Some of them just sleep all day. Sometimes, especially when they’ve just arrived, they don’t even leave their rooms. They cry and spit and punch holes in the walls. Most of them come out eventually, but some don’t, and that’s okay. No one bothers them, except sometimes to offer them a burrito.
They don’t leave, although they could. Why would they?
Do you believe it now? Can this really be how they live out their lives, so close to the City that they can hear the bells clamoring and the processions proceeding? Can they really live together, in a house by the sea? No?
Let me tell you this, then. There used to be a doctor—a nice man with a real white doctor’s coat, who still lives in the City—who came out to their house every Wednesday to check up on them, but that didn’t work out, because he kept feeling uncomfortable and trying to euthanize them. So now, whenever one of them gets sick, a woman comes in on the train from Vallcoris. She doesn’t have a doctor’s coat. She just has a sweater. She doesn’t know about the basement, she doesn’t know about anything, not really. She just takes their pulse and asks them to cough, and leaves them with prescriptions, and no one tries to euthanize anyone.
Is that enough to convince you? Is it still too impossible, that they might just live together in their own house and their own time?
Should I tell you, then, about how they die? You see, it used to be, whenever one of them died, some nice people came out from the City to take the body away. But they were so upset—so apologetic and mumbling as they refused to meet anyone’s eyes—that now no one bothers calling the nice people from the City. Instead, they bury their dead in a small plot behind the garden. They get the old shovels out of the shed, pick a spot in the garden, and begin to dig. Each of them digs, some just a shovelful, some working the whole night, sometimes together, sometimes alone. By the next day, the hole is deep enough to be a grave. They don’t say anything. Not one of them needs instructions on how to mourn.
Can you believe me now? Can you believe that they live their lives and die their deaths in some semblance of peace? Can you believe that their lives are more than the basement we locked them in?
Would you like more? What more would you like? Would you rather imagine them suffering, even away from the City, away from the basement, even in their own house by the sea? Would you like to hear about screams, or nightmares, or the new one, beating herself bloody against the walls? Would you like to imagine that the house needs extra mops because, sometimes, even though they hate mops (and all of them hate mops), they can’t sleep through without a mop or two to be terrified of?
Or is that not it? Are you missing something else altogether?
Would you rather hear about marches, political protests, public shaming and human rights laws? Even though we both know that never happened and we both know that it never could happen, would it comfort you, to imagine them fighting back? Would you rather hear that they all walked away from the City and never came back? Or do you prefer to pretend that they might someday return—returning, not like you did when you were fourteen and walked away and then slunk back two weeks later—not in shame, but in anger, with tank columns and cluster bombs and chains of command and theories of legitimate violence?
Believe those things, if it makes you happy. I, though, will believe that they live alone, together, in a house by the sea.
Foxy and Tiggs
Justina Robson
Foxy and Tiggs were at the scene. The sun beat down out of a merciless noon sky, falling on tourist, tour guide, and body alike. It fell on Foxy’s lustrous fur and Tiggs’ crocodilian green hide and made Tiggs’ arm and crest feathers gleam with the beautiful gothic tones of an oil slick as she carefully picked over the site of the find.
Foxy shepherded the tourists back into the softly floating cocoon of their tour bus. “Back you go, folks, back you go. Crime scene here. Got to do some investigating and we’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t you worry.” She adjusted the lie of her hotel uniform—a dinky little hat with a feather in the band that marked her as a detective inspector and a smart jacket tailored to fit her small body perfectly and provide a harness to hold the items of gear she carried. Her brush waved behind her like a huge duster, rufous red and tipped with soft cream.
Her nose twitched. The body had been out a few hours and it was starting to stink.
She wasn’t the only one who thought so. Overhead, a gyre of vultures circled, stacking up one by one as they drifted in across the savannah. On the ground, Tiggs put out a claw to check the pockets of the deceased as the tourists adjusted their eyecams and leaned over the deck rails of the bus to get some good footage. It wasn’t every day you saw a velociraptor investigating a murder, and since this wasn’t on the itinerary or billed as an extra, it was premium gold level XP.
Foxy strolled up and down over the sandy earth but, as she expected, there were no telltales here to give the game away just yet. No footprints, no tyre tracks, no blow-patterns from hover vehicles. She was going to have to wait for Tiggs’ exemplary nose to give her the facts as it hoovered up local DNA and fibres and compared them with the hotel’s registry of guests and inventory of luggage.
The tour guide, a regular Earth human with a blonde crew cut and a rather fabulous waxed moustache, anxiously tapped the hull of the bus as he watched with grim fascination.
“Should I stay here? I mean, this is prime lion country. We’re just lucky the lions didn’t already find him. It is a him, yeah? Well, this is the home country of a particularly large pride right now. Did he—was he killed by a lion?”
Foxy watched Tiggs snort as she heard this—people often assumed Tiggs was just an animal or a bot. Foxy got past this by being a humanoid foxling, the size of an eight-year-old child, small and rounded, in every way the picture of a designed but intelligent being. Tiggs was a long four metres of saurian which looked exactly like the park ’saurs you could see in Lands of the Lost, albeit with less feathers and a blunter snout to fit all the telemetrics in. Tiggs enjoyed the anonymity and now played to the crowd as she flexed her hands with their huge hook claws and bent down, jaws open for a wide capture as if to consume the corpse.
The crowd ooh-ed and the bus rocked back as they recoiled. Tiggs smiled, although only Foxy could tell. Tiggs’ face didn’t have the mobility for expressions, but through their full-encryption powerlinks they were almost one being. They chatted privately as Tiggs stood up and made a show of stalking around, searching the local brush while at the same time picking up a bit of intel for the safari systems since she was there.
“Dumped from quite a height,” Tiggs said. “Broken bones all post-mortem, some impact bruising and burst lungs full of water. Drowned. Shorts dried out but they were wet when he landed. There’s droplets of salt on the ground and the leaves of this thorn tree here. Impact spread shows a bit of a roll. I’m waiting on the lab getting back to me about the water.”
Foxy reassured the tour guide and helped him re-schedule so that the tourists could enjoy seeing the arrival of the clean-up crew coming for the body. “Drowned over in Pirate Booty Bay,” she told him and her entranced audience.