Busted Flush by George R. R. Martin

radio tuned slightly off-station.
    Niobe weaved through a maze of EEGs, EKGs, respirators, dialysis machines, and still other devices constructed specifically for her children. Doctors and nurses surrounded the oversized infant incubator where Xerxes lay, working frantically to keep him alive.
    A tangle of tubes and wires snaked from Xerxes’s body to the machines. His skin, smooth and rosy-pink just this morning, hung waxy and sallow from sunken cheeks. Rheumy cataracts leaked sour-milk tears down his face. Even the thick black head of hair he’d styled into a little Elvis pompadour to make her laugh was coming out in clumps.
    She had promised to take him to Las Vegas.
    Mom? I’m scared
.
    “I’m here now,” she said. “Don’t be scared, okay?”
    “Mom . . .”
    “Hush, kiddo.”
    A single thought, through a blizzard of psychic static:
I love you, Mom
.
    And then Xerxes was gone. The blanket sagged, empty but for a slurry of organic molecules. The ammonia-and-hay odor of dead homunculus wafted out of the incubator. Niobe sobbed. One nurse hugged her tightly, patting her on the back and murmuring encouragements, while another collected the dead child’s remains in a sample jar.
    The chimes sounded again, louder this time. A low voice on the PA system. “Genetrix to therapy two. Genetrix to therapy two, please.”
    She didn’t want to go. But Xerxes’s death had slipped a knife into her gut, and every secret, selfish thought gave it a vicious twist. Regularity wascrucial. Generations yet unborn—but cherished no less—would drop like mayflies, if not for BICC’s rigid methodologies. And so she went, for the sake of her future family.
    Therapy room two mimicked the layout of Niobe’s own quarters, except for the larger bed (a California king-size mattress) and the curtains along one wall.
    Christian was seated on the edge of the bed. He looked up when she walked in. “Where were you? They’re going nuts in there.” He gestured at the curtains with the long, knobby fingers that always felt warm and strong on her hips.
    “With Xerxes.” She wiped her eyes. “He passed. Just now.”
    He grunted, pulling the shirt of his BICC uniform over his head. The soft blond hair on his body didn’t catch the lights, so his chest looked slick and bare.
    “He was scared,” she said, walking behind a bamboo privacy screen in the corner. Niobe had insisted on the screen. As she draped her sweatshirt over the top of the screen, she added, “He would have liked it if you visited.”
    “Who?”
    “Xerxes.”
    “Oh.”
    The bristly hairs at the base of her tail snagged the waistband on her sweatpants. As she worked them free, she added, “You could come, next time.” Christian said nothing.
    She scooted under the covers while Christian had his back turned. The linens made scratchy noises as she pulled the sheets around her. She wished she had shaved her legs, wished the wild card hadn’t given her pig hair.
    The nightstand clunked as Christian dropped a prescription bottle into the drawer. He popped a pill in his mouth. She pretended not to see any of it. The pills made her feel ugly. Uglier.
    She lifted the covers for him, but he paused to draw the curtains, revealing a long mirror along the far wall.
    “Maybe we can leave the curtains closed, just once.”
    The mattress bobbed as he climbed in next to her. “They go ape-shit when we do that.” As he plumped a pillow under his head, he added, “Besides, it’s all for the kids.”
    A cotton tent raised itself farther down the bed, below Christian’swaist, as he laced his fingers behind his head. The pill had worked, whatever it was.
    She leaned over to kiss him, but he pulled away.
    “C’mon, Niobe. They’re waiting.”
    No warmth between her legs, no tingling desire. Not that it mattered.
    Niobe sighed. She took care not to glimpse the mirror as she straddled Christian, not to see her shapeless, doughy body; her tail; her acne.
    Christian laid his hands