The Resident: An Odd Man Out (part fourteen)

The Resident

Chapter Four

An Odd Man Out

(part fourteen)

Exposure didn’t matter much, they expected to live as long as they lived. Reclaiming parties hauled in troves, shipping bins filled with pillows, sneakers, suitcases, hair tools, car batteries, bubble wrap. Even gloves and masks. They might find bins heaped all the way down a crevasse, or along the high mark of a giant wave. Inside were plastic crates, or cardboard boxes, or pallets with their goods strapped and wrapped.

Tons of stuff, barcoded and shelf-ready, that the government confiscated at once.

Wave patterns and lava fronts also were delineated by piles of human remains, often pre-bagged for removal by the owner’s last choice…of a thing to put on that day. Body Details raked these accumulations and tossed the bones into carts.

For fertilizer, for food crops. To grind them, not to bury them.

“They can’t be human to us anymore, not when there are thousands and thousands. They have to serve their practical purpose, not be eulogized, not supplied with a space to take up.”

Phones, keys, glasses, jewelry, small items with metal, were boxed and stacked in surplus buildings. Towards the day enough of a population had regathered, been found and numbered, that the work of extraction could begin.

This group had been the Builders. The Builders’ time had lasted 383 years. From the cataclysm itself, three billion people survived. Ten years after the cataclysm, a tenth of that number lived.

Tithonians were the third group; Generationals had spanned the two.

“Pioneers?” John asked.

“Oh.” A pause; Claudie not recalling herself saying this.

Then recalling herself saying this. “Pioneers are Tithonians. They were the first to time travel. I am not a Pioneer. Planet sickness wasn’t an identifiable thing when I left, and the program for Returns had been ramped up to transportations almost daily. I was one of three hundred who went that year.”

She arrived in 1963.

“They’d set up an account for me, so I could take out cash in right-looking currency. I was not allowed to get a job or join a garden club or whatever. I could watch tv…you could say, actually, that was my job. We had plenty of time, we weren’t going anywhere. They wanted us to assimilate, practice our accents, use the idioms of the time, play the right social role. Me being a woman, everything normal I had to set aside… I couldn’t talk about politics to anyone. Some party might want me involved, exactly what a time traveler can’t be. I ordered clothes from the Sears catalog. I bought a set of hot rollers so I could copy the models’ hair, make mine straight and pouffed on top. I guess… But you were born in 1960, were you? Maybe you remember.”

“Um. Not much.”

John mumbled this. Claudie a full adult, like Marlo Thomas or Goldie Hawn, when he’d been just old enough to stay up for “one show”, on the sofa with his parents. Shooed to bed at 8:30 or 9:00.

It was a rug-puller.

49

Tithonians

An Odd Man Out (part one)

(2022, 2026 Stephanie Foster)