As he swung around the first flight he rushed headlong into two armed men escorting Corez up, still wearing Tera’s sister’s skin. Surprise was on his side, this time.
Nev ran the first man through the gut, and hit the second with the end of his spear.
“God’s eye, what—” Corez said, and stopped. She had retreated back down the stairs, stumbled, and her wig was aslant now.
“You take the scalps of your people, too?” Nev said. He hefted the spear.
“Now you think about this,” she said. “You don’t know who I am. I can give you anything you like, you know. More bodies than you know what to do with. A workshop fit for the king of the body mercenaries. A thousand body managers better than any you’ve worked with. You’ve dabbled in a world you don’t understand.”
“I understand well enough,” he said.
“Then, the body. I can give you this body. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it? I have others.”
“I don’t care much for people,” Nev said. “That was your mistake. You thought I’d care about the bodies, or Tera, or her sister, or any of the rest. I don’t. I’m doing this for my fucking elephant.”
He thrust the spear into her chest. She gagged. Coughed blood.
He did not kill her, but left her to bleed out, knowing that she could not jump into another form until she was on the edge of death.
Nev ran the rest of the way down into the basements. They had to have a way to fish the bodies out. He found a giant iron pipe leading away from the cistern, and a sluice. He opened up the big drain and watched the water pour out into an aqueduct below.
He scrambled down and down a long flight of steps next to the cistern and found a little sally port. How long until it drained? Fuck it. He opened the sally port door. A wave of water engulfed him.
He smacked hard against the opposite wall. A body washed out with the wave of water, and he realized it was his own, his beloved. He scrambled forward, only to see Tera’s body tumble after it, propelled by the force of the water. For one horrible moment he was torn. He wanted to save his old body. Wanted to save it desperately.
But Tera only had one body.
He ran over to her and dragged her away from the cistern. She was limp.
Nev pounded on her back. “Tera!” he said. “Tera!” As if she would awaken at the sound of her name. He shook her. Slapped her. She remained inert. But if she was dead, and yes, of course she was dead, she was not long dead. There was, he felt, something left. Something lingering. Tera would say it lingered in her bones.
He searched his long memory for some other way to rouse her. He turned her onto her side and pounded on her back again. Water dribbled from her mouth. He thought he felt her heave. Nev let her drop. Brought both his hands together, and thumped her chest. Once. Then again.
Tera choked. Her eyelids fluttered. She heaved. He rolled her over again, and pulled her into his arms.
Her eyes rolled up at him. He pressed his thumb and pinky together, pushed the other three fingers in parallel: the signal he used to tell it was him inhabiting a new body.
“Why you come for me?” Tera said.
He held her sodden, lumpy form in his own plump arms and thought for a long moment he might weep. Not over her or Falid or the rest, but over his life, a whole series of lives lost, and nothing to show for it but this: the ability to keep breathing when others perished. So many dead, one after the other. So many he let die, for no purpose but death.
“It was necessary,” he said.
They crawled out of the basement and retrieved Tera’s sister from the stairwell. It hurt Nev’s heart, because he knew they could only carry one of them. He had to leave his old form. The temple was stirring now. Shouting. They dragged her sister’s body back the way they had come, through the latrines. Tera went first, insisting that she grab the corpse as it came down. Nev didn’t argue. In a few more minutes the temple’s guards would spill over them.
When he slipped down after her and dropped to the ground, he saw Tera standing over what was left of her sister, muttering to herself. She started bawling.
“What?” he said.
“The dead talk to me. I can hear them all now, Nev.”
A chill crawled up his spine. He wanted to say she was wrong, it was impossible, but he remembered holding her in his arms, and knowing she could be brought back. Knowing it wasn’t quite the end, yet. Knowing hope. “What did she say?”
“It was for me and her. Forty years of bullshit. You wouldn’t understand.”
He had to admit she was probably right.
They burned her sister, Mora, in a midden heap that night, while Tera cried and drank and Nev stared at the smoke flowing up and up and up, drawing her soul to heaven, to God’s eye, like a body merc’s soul to a three-days’-dead corpse.
Nev sat with Tera in a small tea shop across the way from the pawn office. The bits and bobs they’d collected going through people’s trash weren’t enough for a workshop, not even a couple bodies, but they had squatted in rundown places before. They could eat for a while longer. Tera carried a small box under her arm throughout the haggle with the pawn office. Now she pushed the box across the table to him.
Nev opened the box. A turtle as big as his fist sat inside, its little head peeking out from within the orange shell.
“What is this?” he asked.
“It’s a fucking turtle.”
“I can see that.”
“Then why’d you ask?” she said. “I can’t afford a fucking elephant, but living people need to care about things. Keeps you human. Keeps you alive. And that’s my job, you know. Keeping you alive. Not just living.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“Just take the fucking turtle.”
He took the fucking turtle.
That night, while Tera slept in the ruined warehouse along the stinking pier, Nev rifled through the midden heaps for scraps and fed the turtle a moldered bit of apple. He pulled the turtle’s box into his lap; the broad lap of a plump, balding, middle-aged man. Nondescript. Unimportant. Hardly worth a second look.
To him, though, the body was beautiful, because it was dead. The dead didn’t kill your elephant or burn down your workshop. But the dead didn’t give you turtles, either. Or haul your corpse around in case you needed it later. And unlike what the guild said, some things, he knew now, were not as dead as they seemed. Not while those who loved them still breathed.
Tera farted in her sleep. Turned over heavily, muttering.
Nev hugged the box to his chest.
WHEN WE FALL
I DON’T REMEMBER the first time I was abandoned and forgotten, but I have told the story of the second time so often that when the memory boils up it feels hot and gummy, like the air that day.
Whoever cared for me—and I can’t be certain they were legal guardians, let alone relatives—took me with them to beg at the crossroads just outside the interplanetary port. I don’t know how long they had me, but I know they were not the first. I remember being hungry. I remember a tall woman with dark hair pulling me close and saying, “Stay here, Aisha.” She gave me a length of sugarcane and a mango. Her skirt was red. I still think of the red skirt when I think of home.
The people I saw as I sat out there, day after day, were all engineered for different worlds. The world I was on then, there was something about the sky . . . bloody red most of the day; stars the rest of the day, and a night filled with blue light. People were tailored to fit where they were from, or the place they’d chosen as home, whether that was a world or the deep black between the stars. Some were tall and fat, short and squat, or spindly; willowy as leaves of grass. Gills, webbed toes, ears that jutted out sharply from faces with eyes the size of jack bolts . . . many had tails; a few had four arms or more. Many wore respirators; teeth gleamed purple behind translucent masks or fuzzy full-bodied filters or suits that clung to their bodies like a second skin.
Even then, sitting alone on the mat with my mango and sugarcane,
I couldn’t imagine that none of these people wanted me. I used to pretend, sitting at every port then and later, that somebody would come up and recognize me, or see me and just want me, not for some gain of theirs, but out of pure, unadulterated love. I was skinny and long-fingered, with squinty eyes and tawny skin covered in fine hair. I had a high forehead and a bright shock of white hair that stood straight up. I still wear it that way, long after I figured out the tricks for taming it, because I never did like being tamed. I suppose it never occurred to me to ask why none of them looked like me, because none of them even looked much like each other. I heard once that there’s a test you can take to find out what system your people are most likely in, but I can’t afford the test, and sure couldn’t afford to go back. And who’s to say they’d want me now, when they didn’t before?
It’s difficult to reconcile this memory, still, with what I’m told about our society, about how our people are supposed to be. I see close-knit families and communities embracing one another in media stories. Every audio play and flickering drama squirming at the corner of my vision tells me we care for one another deeply, because we are all only as healthy, happy, and prosperous as our least fortunate member. There is no war, no disease that cannot be overcome, and every child is guaranteed a life of security and love.
But the grand narrative of societies often forgets people like me. They forget the people who fall between the seams of things. They don’t like to talk about what happens below the surface.
I went through a series of homes—way stations, temporary shelters, is probably more accurate. When this story drips out now, to engineers or star hustlers or bounty hunters at whatever watering hole I’m drunk at, most insist I had to be part of some community foster system organized by one government or another.
I wasn’t. I’ve made my own way around, getting work in junk ports and on dying organic ships. I’ve done salvage of old trawlers, rotting on the edge of the shipping lanes, half consumed by some star.
I spent my life with ships.
But I never expected a single ship to change my life.
It shouldn’t have been different from any other job with any other junker. I was working inside a vast, shiny new wing of the Aleron port. It had taken a decade and 30,000 people to turn that heap of rock into a modern port to serve the ships along the shipping lane; by the time they were done, organic ports were already being grown far more efficiently in the next system. It was old, dead tech before it even opened its doors. Fitting that I was there, then.
I was there purely by chance. I’d picked up work on an organic freighter whose owner dumped me and the rest of the crew on Aleron, firing off with our cut of the cargo, profits, and the last of my meager belongings. I was about thirty, far too old to get had like that, but I’d gotten cozy and complacent with enough food in my belly and air in my lungs. All the three of us had to our names were our jumpsuits and whatever we’d stashed in our pockets.
Luckily we had different skill sets. I’m a good mechanic; I can work on dead tech and organic ships, and even some of the semi-sentient ones. I don’t have certifications for all of them, but that also means I’m cheap. I know how to tailor viruses and bacteria and microbial compounds fairly quickly and expertly, and how to counter them when a ship has been infected. I learned all that out on the edges of things, places where you teach yourself how to farm by giving yourself a local virus that encodes the skill in your DNA.
So me and the crew split up and got work separately. I found myself hired out to a lady whose organic wreck of a ship had barely gotten to Aleron on its own before starting to disintegrate around her. The ship needed a full overhaul, which she didn’t like, but nobody else could fix it for what she could pay.
And that’s how I found myself working up against a gooey rotting ship at the ass-end of space in a shiny new obsolete port. The hull peeled away in my hands as I did my diagnostic. Underneath the hull, there at the forward section, was a fine mesh made of spiders’ silk. It should have been far too tough for me to claw through without special equipment, but swaths of it had already turned black and disintegrated.
That’s that last thing I remember before the fall: my hands inside this poor dying ship.
I would hear later from other techs in the hangar that one of the berths three levels above me snapped beneath the weight of a dead tech ship. That ship fell onto the one beneath it, and the full weight of both ships plunged into the great new sentient warship above me.
The prow of the warship dipped sharply and careened directly into me.
It drove my body into the soft flesh of the dying ship I was working on. I have a vague memory of pushing at the hull, absolutely certain that it was by my strength alone that I was not being thrust farther into its flesh and suffocated, entombed forever.
In retrospect, that sounds absurd, me thinking I was strong enough to push away the weight of an entire warship, but I’d hit my head. I wasn’t thinking straight.
As I strained there, stuck between the little organic ship and the hulking warship, my face tilted to one side, breathing through a gap between the ships as wide as my face, I experienced the strangest sensation. My thoughts came to me as gooey colors; bright yellow and foamy sage.
A woman appeared above me. I saw only a sliver of her face, one black eye. My right arm was free above the elbow—I must have been reaching for something over me when I was hit.
“Can you move your fingers?” the woman said.
Her voice conjured up the taste of rice wine and honey; an explosion of lavender and cyano bacteria. The smell of oranges. A red skirt.
I concentrated hard, fixing my gaze on my fingers. After what felt like an age, like trying to bleed through a stone with my mind, I twitched the tip of my pinkie finger.
“Very good,” she murmured. “We’re working to get you out. The pilot for the Mirabelle is the only one who can authorize its movement. Stay here with me awhile.”
She said the last bit as if she’d invited me to a picnic in the rafters above a busy spaceport, some warm and delicious assignation.
My mind tangled with that idea for a moment, then circled back around to that name: Mirabelle. I didn’t know then what had hit me, so I figured the Mirabelle was the ship I was working on, but that wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t, because the lady who owned this hulk had told me what it was called, though my fractured mind couldn’t remember it. I just knew it wasn’t Mirabelle.
I tried to speak, to ask if she could give me a drink of water. I was suddenly parched. When I thought of “water” I saw before me a perfectly rendered image of a water bulb, greasy from long containment, smelly faintly of cellulose. But I could not form the words.
Everything came to me very slowly, as if I were a languid dancer.
Head injuries are peculiar things. I have seen people forever changed, after. Even if you can get your mind working properly again, your personality can shift. Your view of life. Of yourself.
“What’s your name?” the woman said.
I saw my name; imagined writing it. This time my lips moved, but that was all. I blinked furiously.
As if sensing my frustration, the woman took my hand in hers. The nails were perfectly formed, clean, but her hands were rough, almost scaly. Her arms were hairless.
“Squeeze my hand,” she said.
My one unobstructed eye met hers. I concentrated very hard. I imagined a perfect image of my own hand in my mind, squeezing hers. I willed that image to life. Willed it to reality.
My hand trembled in hers, like a bird.
“Good,” she said, and I heard the smile in her voice. “You are very lucky. In all the records of accidents such as this, those injured expire long before help arrives. But the captain is here. I’m sure she’ll give the order, soon. Your people are here. We’ll have you out soon.”
But time stretched on, enough time that I began to feel woozy and tired. My breathing began to go ragged, and blackness lurked at the corners of my vision. It’
s so hard, I remember thinking, to hold this ship up.
She squeezed my hand again, more firmly. “You must stay awake,” she said. “You must talk to me. Tell me about your world. Your family.”
I would later learn that there was some safety protocol that the warship’s fall had triggered, and it was so new that no one had the knowledge of how to turn it off, so the ship was effectively experiencing an emergency shutdown. So instead of moving the ship, all around me, out of sight, a dozen emergency workers were digging me out of the smaller ship, desperately trying to release me before my lungs gave out.
I moved my face. My tongue was thick in my mouth. Something bubbled out, nonsense words. “Red blanket,” I said. “Mushrooms. Sled repair.”
To this day I have no idea what prompted me to say that. My mind was desperately pedaling around, trying to make connections, misfiring.
“Stay with me, lovely,” the woman said. She squeezed my fingers, and began massaging them with hers. It hurt at first. I was losing circulation in that arm. “Tell me something about you.”
“Mech,” I said, and I don’t know if she understood.
But she nodded. I concentrated hard on that black eye, and in that moment, as we gazed at one another, I understood that I was dying, and that the rescuers might not get me out in time. It hurt to breathe. I wheezed. The gooey organic ship beneath me seemed to be slowly folding in on itself under the weight of the warship, pressing me deeper into its flesh.
“I will tell you about a lonely girl,” the woman said. “She came of age knowing she was the only one of her kind, and she would never have a home. Told she would spend all her years alone. She did not like that, but she believed in absolutes, then. In reason and logic. She did not understand that those things are programmed into us, like viruses wriggling into our cells, changing us from the inside out. When they told her to kill, she understood the logic of it because they had told her to. They gave her the logic to make this judgement. Do you understand? But there is nothing logical about death and rebirth. Nothing logical or sane about life. We have only this, each other. Home is this.” She squeezed my fingers.
Meet Me in the Future Page 4