Julian had never written a book, for he had always said that his students were his books. And with the passage of years, Julian’s students had indeed become his books. They were erudite like books, complex like books, long-lasting like books. His students had become great men. Their generation was accomplishing feats that the ancients themselves had never dreamt of. Air wells, ice-ponds and aqueducts. Glass palaces of colored light. Peak-flashing heliographs and giant projection machines. Carnivals and pageants. Among these men, greatness was common as dirt.
It was required, somehow, that the teacher of such men should himself be a great man. So the great men delighted in honoring Julian. He was housed in a room in one of their palaces, and stuffed with creature comforts like a fattened capon. His only duty was to play the sage for his successors, to cackle wise inanities for them. To sing the praises of the golden present, and make the darkest secrets of a dark age more tenaciously obscure.
Futurity could never allow the past to betray it again.
Home Sweet Bi’Ome
PAT MACEWEN
Pat MacEwen is a physical anthropologist by trade with more than a decade’ s worth of experience as a crime scene investigator. “My central field of research, however, is genocide,” she says. “I’ve also worked on war crimes investigations in the former Republic of Yugoslavia (now the independent nation of Kosovo) for the International Criminal Tribunal. I’m deeply interested in global warming, which I think is likely to spawn more genocides, and I’m something of a science geek.” She has published short fiction in several genres: fantasy, sf, horror, and mystery. A new sf novelet, “Taking the Low Road,” is out in 2012. Her forensic/urban-fantasy trilogy, Rough Magic, is forthcoming, with the first volume, The Fallen, out in 2012. Likewise, a YA series about a crippled boy who can’t talk to people but finds out he can talk to dragons. The first volume in that series, The Dragon’s Kiss, is also out in 2012.
“Home Sweet Bi’Ome” was published in F&SF. It is an amusing story about future allergies, biotech solutions, and more. MacEwen says in an interview, “as for the story itself, I dreamed it. A friend of mine has a daughter living in a stripped-down cabin on the slopes of Mt. Shasta because she has hyperallergic syndrome and can’t tolerate the synthetic side of modern life … my subconscious made hay with it.”
I woke up feeling itchy, and started to scratch my face before I’d quite gotten my eyes open.
Oh, no. As soon as I was conscious, I balled my hand up and made a fist. It’s a trained reflex, one I’ve acquired through long practice. You can’t scratch an itch with a fist. You can rub hard, but your knuckles don’t set off the histamine complexes, making them worse than they already are. You won’t tear open tender skin and start off all those nasty secondary infections.
I sat up and balled the other fist. I was itching, all right. All over. But I didn’t have a rash. Wonder of wonders, when I took a look at myself, my skin was a nice even pink everywhere. There were faint welts where I’d begun to scratch, but nothing more.
What on Earth?
As I examined myself, the itch intensified. It traveled. Into my mouth. My ears. My … well, never mind where. Let’s just say that all of my mucosal tissues were staging a riot, and for no apparent reason.
Not knowing what else to do, I got up. Tea, I told myself. Chamomile. Or white. White tea is soothing, and there’s nothing in it that sets me off. I get mine from a guy in Sri Lanka, who grows the stuff without pesticides. He packs the tea in plain old-fashioned wax paper, inside a tin. No plastics, no dyes or preservatives. No excess packaging, covered with ink and shellac and God knows what else.
I padded through the house, careful to keep my hands off my hide. Just walking, however, set off a fresh round of itching, this time on the balls of my feet. Couldn’t quite keep myself from doing a circular Sufi dance across the coarse black fur that serves as a carpet, letting the friction of skin against wiry hair turn the prickling heat into definite inflammation.
The cold enamel tooth-tiles on the kitchen floor calmed it down some but there was no denying the fact that I was having some kind of allergic reaction. To what? There was no nylon in the house. No plastic of any kind. No paint. No fragrance. No synthetic anything. That’s the whole point of a Bi’Ome. Everything is totally organic and completely familiar to me, or at least to my immune system.
Nervously, I checked my fingers. When I get the hives, it shows up first in my hands. I get ugly red blotches (what doctors call urticaria). Then my fingers swell up like stubby pink sausages. My lips, too. I start looking like a Ubangi, except there’s no clay saucer stretching my mouth out of shape. Just oedema. Good old Mother Nature. And when it gets bad, well, my throat closes up. Or I pass out. Then my throat closes up. Where had all my EpiPens gone?
I reached out, grabbed the edge of a pouch underneath the nearest kitchen counter, and felt my fingers slide across half a dozen small hard bumps. Like Braille, only bigger.
I looked down. The rash was an odd one, the bumps looking weirdly transparent and delicate rather than small, hard, and red. Whatever. It speckled half the cabinets, the walls, the ceiling, and most of the pouches I use for drawers.
I spat, “Son of a bug-eater!”
It wasn’t me that had the rash. It was my house.
It took them five hours to send me an EMT—three solid hours to find the clown and another two to get his sorry ass up the mountain. You know how long that is, when you’re fighting a desperate need to scratch where it itches?
Then, when he did show up, he didn’t even have a truck. What he had was all these piercings and implants and crap. He even had a LoJack locked into his skull right behind his left ear. Swear to God, the guy looked like a Borg who’d mated with a mess of fishing tackle. Worse than that, he had a uniform on, a polyester mix. I could tell as soon as the tech climbed off his freakin’ motorcycle. Worse than that, even. Aftershave.
Oh my God. One whiff and my throat closed up.
Not that he noticed. The goof came rambling up to my front door just like some demented encyclopedia salesman, all smiling, eyebrow-beringed, and happy-faced.
I met him with a loaded crossbow.
Seeing that, he stopped dead. Both hands flew up, aerating armpits awash with some kind of deodorant. Fresh Scent, Extra Dry something or other. I started wheezing, fell to my knees, and found myself aiming at the point directly in front of me, which happened to be his crotch.
He definitely noticed that.
“Hey, take it easy.” He turned his hips sideways, acting like he didn’t know he’d just threatened my life.
“Don’t you come any closer,” I gasped.
“I won’t! But you … you called for a tech, right?”
I stared up at him over the length of the quarrel. “You’re it? Where’s Chen? Or Fredo? Or Saylah?”
I got a sheepish smile this time, along with a shrug. “All the regular guys are tied up. If you wanna wait—”
“No! I can’t!”
“Okay, then.” He gathered up some confidence and pulled out a business card, which I did not even think of accepting. After a moment’s embarrassment, he let his hand drop. He introduced himself. “I’m Rey Fox. R-E-Y. Short for Reynard. It’s kind of a joke. See, Moms was French.”
My crossbow wobbled a bit but I did my best to keep it centered on his private parts while I checked his company ID card. Reynard, indeed.