I lurched off my slab of concrete. “Beth, no.” I pressed my cheek to her cart. “I can’t lose you.”
She coughed again. “I don’t think I can talk much more.”
“I’m so sorry, Beth. I should’ve never brought you up here.” I stroked the plastic, but it wasn’t her skin, wasn’t her hair. I couldn’t smell her or feel her. Couldn’t kiss her. “I ruined everything.”
“You were the best thing that ever happened to me, stupid. You and Elvis.”
I didn’t want to laugh, but I had to. “I forgot about Elvis.”
“Don’t ever forget about Elvis.” She made a terrible sound again, and I sat up straight, but it wasn’t a cough, just one of her subvocalizations to her monitor. I heard the speakers crackle.
“This one’s always been my favorite,” she said—managed to say, half-choking and gurgling. “Would have been nice to see a hound dog.”
“A coyote’s better than a hound dog.” I pressed myself as close to her bubble as I could. I couldn’t see through the plastic window of my suit; it was too fogged with tears.
I couldn’t see, but I could listen. I could sit beside her and listen to her try to breathe as we listened to “Hound Dog” one more time.
I could remember her dancing.
I could remember her singing.
When the song was over, I turned off the oxygen in her cart and waited until everything was truly, horribly silent. I wanted to take off my helmet and make sure I really didn’t hear anything, wanted to open her cart and carry her into the woods where the leaves could fall on her and make her one with all the things she’d wanted to see. But I knew she was right about the spores.
I walked through the city for a long time, fighting that hazmat suit, looking for some kind of landmark that matched up with my old maps. Finally I came to a heap of rubble that blocked the ruins of the old city street. I wondered if there was any way to get around it or if I dared go over the top. Not like this, there wasn’t. I’d need my hands free for sure.
I held them out in front of me, my own two hands hidden inside their rubber sausage casings. Were they even protected in there? Had they ever been? And what did protection even mean when I was never, ever going back to safety?
Fuck it.
I took off the suit.
Suddenly there were sounds all around me, flutterings and rustlings and whisperings and chirpings. I didn’t know what any of them meant or what might have made them. Beth had been the one who studied natural history. I was only a food scientist, and a second-best one at that.
Then there was a sound I recognized from movies and games and recordings: birdsong. A bird sang somewhere ahead of me, beyond the nearly impassible heap of rubble that might have been an office tower or a shopping mall or the capital of the pre-apocalypse world.
A bird sang. It wasn’t Elvis, but it would do.
THE LAST TO MATTER
ADAM-TROY CASTRO
Adam-Troy Castro’s twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of Gustav Gloom. The final installment in the series, Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear, came out in 2016. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany), and been selected for inclusion in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. His latest projects are a mainstream thriller currently making the publishing rounds, and an audio collection he expects to announce early in 2019. He lives in Florida.
Kayn knew he was being rejected by the orgynism for almost a full year before it fully expelled him.
He could easily live a million years past this humiliation and never understand what he had done to deserve such a rejection from the collective that had loved him so well, for so long.
He had been one of the orgynism’s founders, the man who had provided its organizing principles and solicited the first participants, the architect who had drawn up the parameters for the pleasure-feedback loops, and as a result, he’d been honored to spend its many years of existence as the seed nexus around which all its carnality orbited. For all that time, the orgynism’s participants, male and female and neuter and recombinant, had always tithed some of their pleasure to his, their sensations flowing in his direction through the neural connections all had agreed to upon joining the collective, just as their other surgically implanted connections also provided him with oxygen for his lungs and nutrients for his blood. Pierced in all of a dozen places and piercing in a dozen others, he had known nothing but mindless bliss, at the orgynism’s core.
How lucky he had considered himself, at those rare moments when conscious thought had space to intervene, for living in a time when such things were possible!
One would think that the bastards would have damn well appreciated that.
Then, one by one, the connections were withdrawn, the devotion toward his pleasure above all else was sidelined, and the peristalsis of the dozens of interconnected bodies began to move him, bit by bit, toward the outskirts. The limbs of his many lovers now grasped him not in embrace but in firm urging toward the exit, and though they were gentle about it, taking more than a year to shift him from the orgynism’s center to its periphery, they also brooked no argument. He continued to feel pleasure. But, throughout, he also knew that he was being dispensed with.
At the end of the year, Kayn popped sweaty and glistening from the hovering sphere of bodies, and slammed to the soft floor a man-height below. The living tubes that had provided him with nutrients and euphoric drugs tore free of his flesh and slithered back into the ball of copulating bodies, there to disappear beneath the shifting landscape of shoulders and buttocks and ecstatic faces. Nobody whose features were exposed bothered to open their eyes and acknowledge his bereft status, his enforced farewell; not one of the women, not one of the men, not any of the recombinants said goodbye. As far as they were concerned, he was gone, and he was forgotten, as irrelevant to the orgynism as any other sight or sound of the world its pleasures locked out.
For some time, he sat moist and heartbroken below the throbbing ball of former lovers, lost in the novelty of separation. Then a portal opened on the wall to his right and his replacement, a creature with a half-dozen sets of complete sexual organs from forehead to midriff, undulated in, its naked form already studded with the necessary interfaces for the nutrient tubes and neurological feedback wires. It glanced at him, registering his predicament but not remarking on it, before turning away and striding the rest of the way to the orgynism Kayn had left and that it was now joining. One leap and the new lover was caught. The orgynism throbbed at the point of impact, and swallowed the newcomer whole.
Kayn considered fighting his way back into the collective, clawing with tooth and nail back to a dominant place at its center. But as devastated as he was, he knew that this would be a pathetic and doomed attempt at rape. He’d be outnumbered, for one thing. For another, now that not all of his consciousness was dominated by incoming sensation, the emptiness of the rutting that had occupied so many years of his life depressed him. Maybe that’s why his lovers had expelled him; they’d sensed his flagging commitment.