Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction Read Online Free PDF Page B

Margo’s reasoning for finally joining them at dinner.
    They had boiled the turtles, neatly diced, in four tins of reconstituted cream of tomato soup. Chin-Hae, the ship’s cook, who was alternately sipping beer out of his prosthetic leg and adding it to the pot, looked up grinning when she appeared. Margo hadn’t known that anyone still ate turtles. But then, until this voyage, she hadn’t known there were spaceships that couldn’t leave immediate space, or people who replaced their vital members with removable plastic and bottle-glass.
    The mess turned out to be two long metal tables bolted to the floor. The men crowded around them on one-footed metal benches and passed stories and sloshing carafes of beer. Every one of them had scars they bragged about, and for the first time, Margo wondered whether this was because they really took any pride in them, or because they lacked the technology to remove and forget them.
    Pilgrim Pilgrim looked up at her. “Come to eat, or just watch?” he asked.
    “Eat.”
    “Waitin’ on the servitors?”
    “No.” Though Margo realized as she said it, that she had been.
    The captain tossed her down a thick wooden bowl. “Queue up and get yourself some turtle surprise, before this mess of rapists and degenerates eats it all.”
    Margo paused, then dragged herself to the back of the line forming in front of Chin-Hae’s pot. When it was her turn, Chin-Hae winked at her, a little drunkenly, and filled her bowl to the brim, tilting in a little extra beer from the bottom of his leg.
    He intended this as a kindness, she was sure, but it meant that she had to make her way to the tables pushing along a wildly sloshing bowl of oily turtle meat. The whole crew watched, apparently entertained, while she left a splash trail. Margo stopped at the benches. “You’re gonna want to help me up,” she said.
    “Sure a’ that, are you?” said Kell.
    “Pretty sure,” she said, evenly.
    No one moved, so Margo proceeded to get up onto the bench herself. She couldn’t put weight onto her legs, but if she lunged forward violently enough, the one-footed bench rocked, no matter who was sitting on it. If she did that enough times, eventually the drunkest lost his balance; the man who’d sewed his own arm back on fell straight backwards, which made everyone laugh too hard. “All right, all right…” He picked her up under the armpits and stuck her in his own seat. “Christ, you’re a shit.”
    Diallo cut Margo a thick slice of very brown bread for her soup. Rumer Pilgrim poured her a cup from the carafe, and raised his own, almost imperceptibly. Margo flattened the smile on her lips.
    Before long, Chin-Hae brought out a very motor-oil looking whiskey, and some apples and pears in tin cups, roasted without cinnamon or sugar. “Enjoy these, gentlemen,” said Pilgrim, frowning at the fruit, and Chin-Hae. “They’re the only ones you’re like to get out of the bunch.”
    “We’re damn well going to have some,” said Kell. “They cost us enough.”
    “Why?” asked Margo.
    “’Scuse me?”
    “Why would you pay for apples? What kind are they?”
    No one answered her. “Are they rare, or something? They look like lab apples.” The fruit was just exactly like the smallish, slightly underripe specimens that came out of every food lab in every corner of every galaxy in UN space.
    The captain paused, then said, eyes on Kell, “That could be considered rare enough for some folks.”
    Margo knew a little history. “Sure, but… not anymore, though. People don’t pay for stuff like that anymore.”
    “Stuff like what, do you suppose?”
    “Like, fruit, or grains, or simple proteins. That’s the whole point of food labs. You’re always replicating, so there’s no food shortages, and nobody has to pay.”
    Pilgrim nodded. “Well, that’s a cracker-jack idea if I ever heard one.”
    “It’s part of the rules of compliance for a colony’s admission to the UN.” That terrible, smug,