“A prototype of what, exactly?” she asked. Her debriefing on Io had been remarkably . . . brief.
“There’s much to know about it,” the recruiter said. “We won’t send you out until you’ve bonded with it, of course. That’s our worry. That it won’t take. But . . . there is an indication that you and the satellite are genetically and temperamentally matched. It’s quite fortunate.”
Enyo wasn’t sure she believed in fortune or coincidence, but the job paid well, and it was only a matter of time before people found out who she was. The satellite offered escape. Redemption. “Sure, but what is it?”
“A self-repairing—and self-replicating, if need be—vehicle for exploring the galactic rim. It will take snapshots—exact replicas—of specified quadrants as you pass, and store them aboard for future generations to act out. Most of that is automated, but it will need a . . . companion. We have had some unfortunate incidents of madness, when constructs like these are cast off alone. It’s been grown from . . . well, from some of the most interesting organic specimens we’ve found in our exploration of the near-systems.”
“It’s alien, then?”
“Partially. Some of it’s terrestrial. Just enough of it.”
“It’s illegal to go mixing alien stuff with ours, isn’t it?”
The recruiter smiled. “Not on Eris.”
“Why Eris? Why not Sedna, or a neighboring system?”
“The concentrated methane that will give you much of your initial inertia comes from Eris. The edge of the Sol system is close enough for us to gain access to local system resources at a low cost, but far enough away to . . . well, it’s far enough away to keep the rest of the system safe.”
“Safe from what?”
“There’s a danger, Enyo. A danger of what you could . . . bring back. Or perhaps . . . what you could become.”
Enyo regarded the spiky satellite. “You should have hired some techhead, then.” She was not afraid of the alien thing, not then, but the recruiter made her anxious. There was something very familiar about her teeth.
“You came highly recommended,” the recruiter said.
“You mean I’m highly expendable.”
They came to the end of the long spoke, and stepped into the transparent bubble of the airlock that sat outside the pulsing satellite.
“The war is over,” the recruiter said, “but there were many casualties. We make do with what we have.”
“It’s breathing, isn’t it?” Enyo said.
“Methane, mostly,” the recruiter said.
“And out there?”
“It goes into hibernation. It will need less. But our initial probes along the galactic rim have indicated that methane is as abundant there as here. We’ll go into more detail on the mechanics of its care and feeding.”
“Feeding?” Enyo said.
“Oh yes,” the recruiter said. She pressed her dark hand to the transparent screen. Her eyes were big, the pupils too large, like all the techs who had grown up on Eris. “You’ll need to feed it. At least a few hundred kilos of organic matter a turn.”
Enyo gazed up at the hulk of the thing. “And where exactly am I going to get organic matter as we orbit the far arms of the galaxy?”
“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” the recruiter said. She withdrew her hand, and flashed her teeth again. “We chose you because we knew you could make those kinds of decisions without regret. The way you did during the war. And long before it.”
Enyo sliced open the slick surface of the superpod with her weapon. There was no rush of Tuataran atmosphere, no crumpling or wrinkling about the wound. No, the peridium had already been breached somewhere else. Arso and Dax hung back, bickering over some slight. Enyo wondered if they had known one another before Reeb picked them up. They had, hadn’t they? The way she had known Arso. The snapshot of Arso. Some other life. Some other decision.
Inside, the superpod’s bioluminescent tubal corridors still glowed a faint blue-green, just enough light for Enyo to avoid stepping on the wizened body of some unfortunate maintenance officer.
“Don’t you need direction?” Reeb tickled her ear. But she already knew where the colonists were. She knew because she had placed them there herself, turns and turns ago.
Enyo crawled up through the sticky corridors, cutting through pressurized areas of the superpod, going around others. Finally, she reached the coded spiral of the safe room that held the colonists. She gestured to Arso.
“Open it,” she said.
Arso snorted. “It’s a coded door.”
“Yes. It’s coded for you. Open it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s why you’re here. Open it.”
“I—”
Enyo lifted her weapon. “Should Enyo make you?”
Arso held up her hands. “Fine. No harm. Fucking dizzy core you’ve got, woman.”
Arso placed her hand against the slimy doorway. The coating on the door fused with her spray-on suit. Pressurized. Enyo heard the soft intake of Arso’s breath as the outer seal of the safe room tasted her blood.
The door went transparent.
Arso yanked away her hand.
Enyo walked through the transparent film and into the pressurized safe room. Ring after ring of personal pods lined the room, suffused in a blue glow. Hundreds? Thousands.
She glanced back at Dax. Both she and Arso were surveying the cargo. Dax’s little mouth was open. Enyo realized who she reminded her of, then. The recruiter. The one with the teeth.
Enyo shot them both. They died quickly, without comment.
Then she walked to the first pod she saw. She tore away the head of her own suit and tossed it to the floor. She peered into the colonist’s puckered face, and she thought of the prisoner.
Enyo bit the umbilicus that linked the pod to the main life system, the same core system responsible for renewing and replenishing the fluids that sustained these hibernating bodies.
The virus in her saliva infected the umbilicus. In a few hours, everything in here would be liquid jelly. Easily digestible for a satellite seeking to make its last turn.
As Reeb cursed in her ear, she walked the long line of pods, back and back and back, until she found two familiar names. Arso Tohl. Dax Alhamin. Their pods were side by side. Their faces perfectly pinched. Dax looked younger, and perhaps she was, in this snapshot. Arso was still formidable. Enyo pressed her fingers to the transparent face of the pod. She wanted to kiss them. But they would be dead of her kiss soon enough.
Dead for a second time. Or perhaps a fifth, a fiftieth, a five hundredth. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.
It was why she piloted Enyo-Enyo.
The woman waiting on the other side of the icy bridge was not one Enyo recognized, which did not happen often. As she guided the prisoner’s pod to the woman’s feet, she wondered how long it had been, this turn. How long since the last?
“What do you have for us?” the woman asked.
“Eris is very different,” Enyo said.
The woman turned her soft brown face to the sky and frowned. “I suppose it must seem that way to you. It’s been like this for centuries.”
“No more methane?”
“Those wells went dry five hundred years ago.” The woman knit her brows. “You were around this way long before that happened. You must remember Eris like this.”
“Was I? I must have forgotten.”
“So what is it this time?” the woman said. “We’re siphoning off the satellite’s snapshots now.”
“I brought you the prisoner,” Enyo said.
“What prisoner?”
“The prisoner,” Enyo said, because as she patted the prisoner’s pod something in her memory ruptured. There was something important she knew. “The prisoner who started the war.”
“What war?” the woman said.
“The war,” Enyo said.
The woman wiped away the snow on the face of the pod, and frowned. “Is thi
s some kind of joke?” she said.
“I brought her back,” Enyo said.
The woman jabbed Enyo in the chest. “Get back in the fucking satellite,” she said. “And do your fucking job.”
Back to the beginning. Around and around.
Enyo wasn’t sure how it happened, the first time. She was standing outside the escape pod, a bulbous, nasty little thing that made up the core of the internode. It seemed an odd place for it. Why put the escape pod at the center of the satellite? But that was where the thing decided to grow it. And so that’s where it was.
She stood there as the satellite took its first snapshot of the quadrant they moved through. And something . . . shifted. Some core part of her. That was when the memories started. The memories of the other pieces. The snapshots.
That was when she realized what Enyo-Enyo really was.
Enyo stepped up into the escape pod. She sealed it shut. Her breathing was heavy. She closed her eyes. She had to go home, now, before it broke her into more pieces. Before it reminded her of what she was. War criminal. Flesh dealer. Monster.
As she sealed the escape pod and began drowning in life-sustaining fluid, she realized it was not meant for her escape. Enyo-Enyo had placed it there for another purpose.
The satellite took a snapshot.
And there, on the other side of the fluid-filled pod, she saw her own face.
The squalling children were imperfect, like Enyo. She had already sold Reeb to some infertile young diplomatic aide’s broker in the flesh pits for a paltry sum. It was not enough to get her off the shit asteroid at the ass end of the Mushta Mura arm. She would die out here of some green plague, some white dust contagion. The death dealers would string her up and sell her parts. She’d be nothing. All this pain and anguish, for nothing.
Later, she could not recall how she found the place. Whispered rumors. A mangled transmission. She found herself walking into a chemically scrubbed medical office, like someplace you’d go to have an industrial part grafted on for growing. The logo on the spiral of the door, and the coats of the staff, was a double circle shot through with a blue dart.
“I heard you’re not looking for eggs or embryos,” she said, and set Dysmonia’s swaddled little body on the counter.
The receptionist smiled. White, white teeth. He blinked, and a woman came up from the back. She was a tall, brown-skinned woman with large hands and a grim face.
“I’m Arso Tohl,” the woman said. “Let’s have a look.”
They paid Enyo enough to leave not just the asteroid, but the Mushta Mura arm entirely. She fled with a hot bundle of currency instead of a squalling, temperamental child. When she entered the armed forces outside the Sol system, she did so because it was the farthest arm of the galaxy from her own. When a neighboring system paid her to start a war, she did so gladly.
She did not expect to see or hear from the butchers again.
Not until she saw the logo on the satellite recruiter’s uniform.
Enyo ate her fill of the jellified colonists and slogged back to the satellite to feed it, to feed Enyo-Enyo. Reeb’s annoying voice had grown silent. He always stopped protesting after the first dozen.
She found him sitting in the internode with the prisoner, his hands pressed against the base of the pod. His head was lowered.
“It was enough to make the next turn,” Enyo said.
“It always is,” he said.
“There will be other crews,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why are you melancholy?” If she could see his face, it would be winter.
He raised his head. Stared at the semblance of a body floating in the viscous fluid. “I’m not really here, am I?”
“This turn? I don’t know. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you aren’t. It depends on how many snapshots Enyo-Enyo has taken this turn. And how she wants it all to turn out this time.”
“When did you put yourself in here?” He patted the prisoner’s pod.
“When things got too complicated to bear,” she said. “When I realized who Enyo-Enyo was.” She went to the slick feeding console. She vomited the condensed protein stew of the colonists into the receptacle. When it was over, she fell back, exhausted.
“Let’s play screes,” she said. “Before the next snapshot. We might be different people, then.”
“We can only hope,” Reeb said, and pulled his hands away from the prisoner.
THE CORPSE ARCHIVES
THE BODIES YOU SPEAK OF, those that existed before the world was silenced and unmade, the bodies of my first memory, are those that danced naked on the hard, black earth around the fires our keepers allowed us. Our fires threw coals into the thick, hot air; coals that flared and darkened and died and drifted down upon us, coating our hands, our faces, our brown bodies, in black soot that made us darker than the earth.
Whenever I tried to join the dancers, the woman who called herself my mother would clutch me to her with her claws.
“Keep here, keep here, Anish,” she would say. The lids never closed over her bulging eyes. Her mouth was cut wide, so wide that her face was all mouth and lips and teeth. I dream about her still, about her devouring me whole.
She was so beautiful.
“Don’t you join that, don’t dance that,” she would say. “You dance that and you’ll be like the rest of us. A mistake, a burned thing. Not made, not used, just nothing.”
When the stack of synthetic logs burned down to a fine black dust, the woman who called herself my mother released me. I ran across the earth to join the dancers outside the covered sleeping pens. Here, they told me the stories of their bodies.
When I think of my first conception of a written record of the past, I think of a body called Senna who had a burn-scarred face with burned-shut eyes. It was this body that showed us how the sky burned when the keepers came; the rivers ran red as the ripple of welts that ran down across the body’s throat, over the breasts, ending in a pool of scarred flesh that was once the navel. Senna went mad before the keepers finished writing on her. She screamed and cried and begged to be taken to the pens, to live out her life among the other partially perfected texts that the keepers could not bear to throw away.
I was the most hideous of these texts. I knew it even then, when the woman who called herself my mother could still carry me in her arms. The other texts had traces of unwritten flesh—smooth, incomplete, ugly—but I, I was completely untouched. The whole of my body remained as it had been birthed. I was grotesque, obscene. They were merely incomplete.
These incomplete texts told me I was placed there because the woman who birthed me was a violent body, a mad thing that marked her own history upon her body. She cut open the contents of her self and spilled them onto the cold metal floor of the birthing center . . . including me. She died in her own blood and entrails and my afterbirth.
I was the living text of my mother’s existence, the other bodies said. That was why the keepers saved me . . . But knowing that did not make me any more beautiful.
The other body-memories of my life are later, much later, and these bodies, yes, these are the bodies that led me to Chiva, Chiva . . . the one you asked me about.
I think of them often, these bodies. Their hideously smooth skins, their ugly, round faces, the thick, dark hair of their heads and arms and legs. When I see these empty bodies, I remember the burning of the partial texts.
I remember the burning of my kin.
These obscene texts arrived through the circular gate of the compound under the heat of a summer sun that looked flat and orange against the blue, blue sky. They told me the keepers had sent for me. They loaded me into their vehicle and locked me inside.
The others they herded together at the center of our dusty compound. Hundreds of partial texts.
The bodies clung to one another. Clawed hands tipped in crescent-moon nails, twisted torsos wrapped in triangular blue welts, flattened palms fused to splayed hips, gaping mouths without teeth. These precious, be
autiful bodies gripped their neighbors so tightly they rent flesh, drew blood.
I pressed my palms to the transparent window of the vehicle and called out to them. I screamed. And screamed.
But the vehicle was a closed box. I heard nothing but my own screaming.
The empty texts sprayed the bodies of my kin with a thin, reddish liquid that coated their faces, torsos, limbs. One of the empty texts ignited a flare. The red fire hurt my eyes.
Fire crawled across my kin like a living thing. Bodies bubbled and melted and charred.
I saw the terrified open mouths of my kin, but heard nothing. Those bodies that pressed against me at night, those bodies that probed my flesh with curious delight and hunger; bodies I had touched, caressed, held; bodies I had so envied and admired. Bodies perfected as mine would never be. Bodies I loved.
Before the sun touched the horizon, all the fire left of my kin was a fine grayish ash.
The empty texts strode back to the vehicle and put their flammable fluid into the back where I sat.
“You are called Anish?” one of them asked.
I nodded.
“Are you a dumb body, Anish?”
“Better hope you are,” the other said. “If you’re lucky they’ll breed you and write on you. But if you’re smart they’ll make you an archivist. Better hope they don’t, Anish. Better hope they just feed you so you fuck.”
I did not know then what an archivist was. But I knew my mother had been chosen to breed, and had committed the most horrific of acts. Now only I remained to record the history of her existence.
I am most comfortable speaking of the archives, of written history. Here is truth that I touched and altered as necessary. Understand the archives, and you will understand the text of my unmaking. You will understand Chiva.
I passed the tests that said I was not a dumb body, the tests all empty texts must take in the compounds by the sea. The older empty bodies moved me and the other students to the archives. There, they kept us in separate rooms just big enough to lie down in. The keepers designated bodies that acted as our overseers, all of them smooth and empty texts like me and the other students. These overseers locked us in our rooms at night.
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