Lightspeed Magazine Issue 35 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, magazine
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2013-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

Desirina Boskovich has published fiction in Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, and Clarkesworld, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Last Drink Bird Head. She is an ’07 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop. Find her online at desirinaboskovich.com.

A Love Supreme

Kathleen Ann Goonan

Ellie Santos-Smith grabs a clean white coat as spring dawn brightens her worn Oriental rug and streaks with sun her only luxury, a grand piano.

She runs a comb through her jet-black hair, cut short because she thinks that makes her look older. Her smooth skin glows with 20-ish health, though she is 47.

Patients distrust young doctors. Nanomed infusions keep her body young, her mind sharp, and mitigate her crippling agoraphobia. She has worked hard to be able to live in a minuscule apartment in The Enclave, a safe, low-population-density bubble in Washington, D.C. In this small, pure paradise, the incredibly rich claim more cubic feet than most people in the world can dream of, dine on rare organic food, and ingest the most finely tuned infusions.

She hates herself for needing this. But she does. If she is to help anyone, if she is to put her hard-won training to use, she does. She can walk to the Longevity Center for her frequent infusions and, after that, to her job as an emergency physician at Capital Hospital without being trapped in a car, a subway, a plane.

Her phone rings. “Dad?” His voice gravelly, odd. Not that she’s heard from him in a long time.

“Hi, hon.”

She thinks blue for a moment. His eyes, tear-shimmered blue beneath a thatch of sun-whitened hair, all those years ago. He had been abruptly summoned from his marine biology kingdom the day her mother was murdered, as Ellie watched, during the First East Coast Riot. He’d fled back to his undersea haven soon afterwards, leaving her to Grandma and boarding schools.

“Can we talk later? My infusion is overdue; then I’m working emergency till seven,” she says. She imagines him in the teak cabin of his Key West-anchored sloop, stubbornly aging.

“Never mind.” He hangs up.

Same old game. She should be used to his gruff elusiveness, but it always hurts. Her father, a celebrated marine biologist with a worm named after him, quit academia once she got her college scholarships and spent decades painting bizarre ocean creatures, gaining a small international following.

Downstairs, the doorman smiles. She steps out into her safe haven, a few tree-lined blocks of historic mansions, townhomes, restaurants, and shops bounded on one side by Connecticut Avenue and patrolled by security professionals (thugs, to her mind) for which she pays a hefty neighborhood fee. They keep out the homeless, the hungry, the desperate, and the different. Once outside this discreet, invisible boundary she will have to pass through a few blocks she calls The Gauntlet, which throbs with the dense crowds that now fill most of the cities on Earth, before reaching the hospital where she works. Only her nanomed infusions keep panic at bay.

In front of

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