Forever Magazine Issue 95 by Lettie Prell & Bo Balder & D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Author:Lettie Prell & Bo Balder & D.A. Xiaolin Spires [Prell, Lettie & Balder, Bo & Spires, D.A. Xiaolin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, novella, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2022-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Analog, May/June 2021.

Tulip Fever

Bo Balder

Strangers had come to the Slat.

Maybe just inspectors investigating they weren’t fishing or hunting. Or maybe not. Humanity citizens, Jones guessed from their height and clear-eyed looks, their freshly printed yellow oilskins. But they were very tan for this time of year, so maybe not from the Oregon Humanity Enclave. Anyway, it was rumored to have been overrun by America Firsters, who stole children. Tulip children, like Jones de Vries.

Tulip children to grind up for medicine against the plastic plague. At least, that was everyone’s favorite rumor. Jones crawled deeper into her hidey hole behind the stacks of neatly rolled lines, against the main body of the plastic processor. Opa made all the Slat Tulips hide when strangers came aboard.

The deep thumping of the hose pump made it hard to overhear the strangers’ conversation. Opa, her grandfather, looking as sober as he ever got, seemed to be negotiating. He shook his head, mimicked walking away, but then returned. They shook hands, sealing some kind of deal.

Jones swallowed. The other kids had told her a rumor that Opa was going to sell her away from the rig for extra money. Now she was afraid they’d been right.

The world was a dangerous place. Nobody would come to rescue a kidnaped Tulip girl. After the floods and plagues of the twenty-first century, all that was left outside the Slat was Humanities fighting with religious fundamentalists. People on the Slat had to fend for themselves.

Their microplastic processing rig was far away from everything else, here in the remote Northern Pacific Gyre. Life was hard. Microplastic prices had crashed. The longtime residents of the Slat lived off fish and seaweed and printed their own carbs and clothes on ancient industrial printers.

The carbs and fish were mostly contaminated with microplastics, so plastic plague was endemic on the rig. More than half of the surviving second- and third-generation inhabitants carried the Tulip breaking mutation. It eventually killed the carrier adults, but conferred near-immunity for plastic plague on their double allele offspring.

Opa had become a different man after Jones’s papa died of plastic plague. He stomped around the Slat ordering everybody about in his broken, drunk voice with its heavy Dutch accent, doling out slaps and slights at random. Jones dodged his rough hands as much as possible, because nothing she did ever seemed to please him. She was pretty sure he’d sell a no-good person like her away from the Slat if he could.

Jones had some basic skills in maintaining the plastic slurper, but most of the time she was filleting illegal fish and drying or steaming seaweed. Her education had ended when Papa died. Living here was harsh, even in summer, when sometimes the sky was blue, and you could walk around in just a sweater. But lately a mood had come over the rig. People were leaving, the adults got into fistfights, accused each other of stealing, and old Jorge had hanged himself last year.

Life on the Slat was no good anymore.

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