“We wouldn’t get any babies,” Aoife said.
“Never mind that now. Oh, what a day. Old Imoh died, so her house is pulling up roots and going to live in the forest. We really could have used their advice. And my breasts hurt.”
Mama’s shirt was wet with milk.
“Why are you out here—I thought you were tired?”
“House was fussing,” Mama said distractedly. “Never mind that, either. Oh, I can’t think straight when I breastfeed. We have to talk to the other women.”
Aoife could have told her that, but kept her mouth shut.
Mama dragged her back to the village. Aoife could barely keep a grip on Mine. Mama put her hand on the first house at the edge of the fields. The hice could send each other messages faster than women could run. The house would scent the urgency in Mama’s sweat and tell the others.
Both babies were wailing by the time they reached Mama’s house. Mama unslung them and gave one to Aoife to rock while she fed the other. “House, we’re in danger. What can we do?”
House rumbled, as always when it wanted to speak with its voice. To warm up the tubes, get air flowing around the vocal cords in the walls.
“They are your species, Minny. What do you want us to do with them?”
Mama frowned while she rocked the suckling baby. The faraway look in her eyes sharpened as the milk was drawn from her breast. “Imprison them. Maybe Imoh’s house can be persuaded to stay a bit before it uproots?”
House gargled. “A man in a house? Imoh’s house won’t like that. It’ll eat them.”
“Can’t you ask it to wait?”
The floors shuddered. “Imoh’s dead. Her house is already changing. I could keep from eating them, I’ve already got a boy in me so my inner walls are immune to man scent.”
Mama’s face scrunched up. “Oh, do we have to? I’m already so tired.”
“The other hice agree. The young ones won’t have the self-control. Imoh’s house isn’t responding anymore. I think it has started migrating.”
“It should have kept Imoh alive a little longer,” Mother grumbled and switched babies with Aoife.
The baby burped against Aoife’s shoulder, its dark curly head sweaty from the hard work of nursing. It smelled deliciously of milk and baby skin, and less deliciously of poop. People always smelled better than hice, no matter how hard the hice tried.
She whispered to Mine, “When you are grown, I want you to smell like this baby, or like my own hair. Not like Big House.” Mine kissed her cheek with its feeler.
She had to change the baby. Hice ate the used nappy leaves and poo. She stripped nappy leaves off House’s wall, keeping an ear cocked to listen to the conversation. Mine nibbled on her heels, talking to House with one small feeler in the floor.
Mama and House took their time about their discussion. Aoife couldn’t understand why they didn’t get up to do something about the strange men now.
“We can lengthen your lives, but not indefinitely,” House said.
“I know, I know.” Mama sighed. “Are the young women out there yet?”
House boomed. A patch of wall turned dark blue, a color Aoife had never seen House wear before.
“They’re attacking,” it shouted, forgetting all about modulating its voice for human ears. “They damaged my walls!”
Mama plucked the protesting baby off her breast and put it in its cot. She ignored the wailing, milk still seeping from her breast. “Aoife, put the babies in the closet and warn your sisters.”
Aoife pulled her eating knife from her girdle and did as Mama said. Biri and her house stumbled out, Biri flushed and heavy-eyed from play.
“The strangers are attacking House,” Aoife said. “Go out and kill them.”
“Can my house sting them?” asked Biri.
“Yes,” Mama snapped. In one hand she held her scythe, in the other a heavy wooden grain pestle. “Stun them if possible.”
“Where’s Koori and Ho?”
Aoife found Koori cowering in her room. “Stay here,” she said. “We’re fighting. Where’s Ho?”
“She went out to play with Mariah,” Koori said, shaking as if it was her fault.
Aoife’s heart thundered. It might have been Ho out there in the fields, taken by the men. What if they’d killed her house? Now she was getting mad.
The house boomed again and another patch of dark blue bloomed on the opposite wall. Mine shivered in her arms, as if it was feeling House’s pain.
“We go out now,” Mama said. “Keep your weapons down, they might not attack us. They want to steal us, right, Aoife? That means they want us unharmed.”
House opened its sphincter door.
“Stand down!” a male voice yelled. “They’re coming out.”
“Mama,” Aoife whispered, “pretend you want to be stolen.”
Mama nodded.
They stepped outside, Mama, Biri, Aoife, their hands down at their sides, their little hice behind them. Aoife worried someone would step on Mine.
“Don’t shoot, it’s the women! Ma’am, are you all right?”
“Why did you hurt our House?” Mama asked and kept walking toward the three men with black things in their gloved hands. “You could have killed us. The babies.”
The lead man threw a look to the smaller man on the right. “Our apologies, ma’am. My colleagues will escort you to the ship while we take care of the aliens.”
“He means the hice,” Aoife said.
Beard smiled down at her. “We’ve talked before, eh?”
Aoife kept walking, trying to look as scared and childish as she could.
When she was close enough, she stabbed upward with her eating knife and got him in the groin. Beard screamed loudly. The other men turned toward him. A loud bang rang out.
Biri went down without a sound. A fountain of blood spurted from her neck.
“Jesus fuck you killed a child!”
“They attacked first! That little one stabbed Klaus.”
Biri’s house threw itself onto her. Holes appeared in the big house, accompanied by loud bangs. The bangs were coming from the sticks.
“Kill that ugly critter — it’s raping her right now!”
While the strangers were yelling at each other, Mama bashed a skull in. Other women helped, even a few men with hunting bows. The women had brought weapons and hit the strangers until they stopped banging. The strangers didn’t look used to fighting, they only wanted to hurt the hice.
Aoife remembered to breathe. She loosened her clutch on Mine, who was busy absorbing Beard’s blood from her arms. Biri was dead. Biri! Now she would never live in her own house with her own children. The feeling sank like a stone to just below her heart. It hurt.
Some of the strange men were dead, as they deserved. A few had only been wounded and lay moaning and bleeding. Noriko was dead, others were being tended by their hice.
One of their own men had keeled over. Maybe he’d been too old for fighting.
Mama took charge, wild-eyed and leaking breast-milk. The women dragged the strangers inside Mama’s house, even though it was indigo-blotched and shuddering. It declared itself still able to not eat the men. Mama fed dead Beard to it, to speed up its healing.
A strange quiet descended on the village. It was midday, a time for working outdoors and chatting with other women, courting men, playing. Instead, everyone crept inside their hice, shaken, waiting for the return of normal life.
Aoife, her sisters, and Mama sat vigil around Biri’s body and her stunned house. It would consume her and then drag itself into the forest to find its mother tree and gift itself back into her soil. They wept as much for the house as for Biri. Just like her, it would never reach maturity, never plant, nurture children, or become a mother tree at the end of its cycle.
Mama nursed one baby, patting its tiny back in a slow, slow rhythm. It was supposed to soothe the baby, but it soothed everyone. Except Aoife. Her house grazed the soles of her feet and it made her twitchy.
“I don’t know,” Mama said. “I wanted to ask them where they came from, what that thing is that fell from the sky, why they wanted to steal us away from our hice.”
“But not anymore?”
“No,” Mama answered. “At first I thought they might become our neighbors or friends. Now I see these people will never be that. But I won’t do anything hasty. Tomorrow when everyone is rested from the fight, I’ll talk to the women and the grown hice. See what they think.”
“I think we should let the house squash them to a pulp,” Aoife said. “And then eat it.”
Mama ruffled her hair. “It’s a good thing you are not a grown woman yet. A person’s life is not to be taken lightly.”
“But they tried to take our lives. They deserve to have theirs taken.”
“Shush,” Mama said. “You are a child and your opinion doesn’t yet matter. Watch and learn from our decisions.”
Late that night, when everyone had retreated to their chambers—even Biri’s body had been dragged into her room by her sorrowing, quivering house—Aoife snuck out to the dining room. She rapped on the wall where she knew the men to be imprisoned.
“House,” she said, “make me a hole. I want to talk to them.”
House rumbled. It had regained its normal tone of voice. That meant it must be mostly healed. “Why? Your mama forbade it.”
“I want to understand,” she said. “Why they did what they did.”
House thought. “Curiosity about strange creatures is a good thing,” it said. “If we didn’t possess it, the humans would never have become our partners. You are so much more interesting than the iwah we lived with before. Curiosity should be rewarded.”
It made a small hole in the wall.
“Make it bigger? I can hardly see,” Aoife said.
The house didn’t answer. Mine spit on the sides of the little hole and made it part.
Aoife pulled herself up and wriggled inside. House rumbled but didn’t do anything to stop her and Mine.
The floor was packed with strange men lying supine. The house had grown bands to restrain them.
Aoife poked the nearest man. “Wake up.”
He opened his eyes, groggily, and tried to sit, but the house flesh over his chest prevented him. It was the man she’d talked to by the fire.
“What? Who? Huh?”
Aoife smiled at his fuzziness. That gave her the advantage.
His pupils shrank as the house walls grew brighter.
“Why did you try to steal us? Didn’t you think that would make us angry?”
He blinked. “What’s your name? Mine is Jonah.”
Aoife poked him again. “My name is none of your business. Tell me why.”
“You remind me of my niece,” he said. His face twisted. “We just wanted to help you. Haven’t you wondered why there are so few men in the village? Maybe these aliens kill them to keep you for themselves.”
“Just like you were planning to,” Aoife said. And of course the hice culled the men. You just didn’t need that many.
She inched closer. “You should have asked us. Why didn’t you?”
He hesitated. “You’ve been…isolated for so long. Become primitive. We didn’t think you’d understand the scope of the decision.”
It was as she’d thought. Aoife bent forward and slit his throat with her small eating knife. He burbled and fell still.
The house hummed in surprise but didn’t intervene.
Aoife crept among the sleeping men and cut all their throats, even the one that was a woman.
For Biri. For her sad, lonely house.
For all these cautious grown-up women. Someone needed to make the hard decisions.
I.
THERE ARE AN infinite number of universes. This does not mean that every imaginable universe exists. In two-dimensional space, a triangle will never have four sides or two obtuse angles. No substance can freeze and boil at the same time; no living creature can be both alive and dead. And there is no world where time runs in both directions. No matter where you go, how far you travel, how fast or how long—the past is only ever the past.
II.
WE MET ON the bus, on my way to the grocery store and her way to an interview with Scientific Woman or Cutting Edge, on a day when the rain fell like mid-morning coffee, lukewarm and slow. Reflections of gray city sky littered the sidewalks between starched collars and the flooded brims of hats. I caught sight of her through the driver-side window, which was jammed and dripping water into the lap of the man sitting next to me; she was running to catch the bus, dodging briefcases and baby strollers; her sensible black flats were scuffed white around the toes. She wore a wide black skirt, a peach blouse that tied at the throat with a gray ribbon. Her black hair was curly, thick and shoulder-length, her lips a dark pomegranate red.
Every seat and every yellow plastic handhold was taken; she paused by my row as the light changed and we lurched forward. She caught herself on my shoulder, her fingers cold and damp against my collarbone “Sorry,” she said, with a smile that was not at all shy.
I knew her voice from the radio programs, her face from magazine covers. Her leather bag bulged with textbooks with bent covers, folders stained with coffee, ink blots and thumb-print smudges of graphite.
“You’re fine,” I murmured. I wished I could smile back. My purse held my shopping list, a pencil stub, a tube of coral lipstick, ten dollars in cash.
One stop before the radio station, she straightened the ribbon on her blouse, fluffed her damp hair with her fingers. I stared at her; I couldn’t help it. When she caught my eye, I blurted out: “My mother thinks I should have been a scientist, but I never applied to college. I used to build circuits in my grandmother’s basement. I’ve read all about you. I didn’t know you were in the city.”
She blinked slowly. Her red lips parted, shaping a question that never emerged. The bus lurched forward again, the wheels rasping a little on the wet pavement. “I’m looking for an assistant,” she said at last. She fished in her bag for a moment, handed me her card.
III.
WHEN SHE WAS born, her mother was already dead; she was delivered by Caesarean section on a morning when the rain fell like blood from a broken artery. Her father had come home from work one afternoon, wet and tired, with motor oil under his fingernails, to find his pregnant wife lying in a heap on the kitchen floor. The sink and the floor around her were full of water, clipped carnations, shards of glass; he slashed his hand as he tried to take her pulse. At the hospital, they bound his fingers in clean white gauze and told him that she was gone.
For the next two months, a machine pumped her lungs, filtered nutrients into her bloodstream. Her grandmother hated it, said they should allow her the dignity of death; said she would never have wanted it, the machine’s reedy rasping voice, the metal and silicone. Beneath the oxygen mask, the feeding tubes, her skin was cold and waxlike. The boat mechanic sat beside her bed, tracing the scars on his thick fingers. He wanted his daughter to be born.
She wonders what her mother would have wanted. Wonders often, setting aside her textbooks and rubbing her tired eyes. Wonders as she scrapes the oil from beneath her fingernails, as she turns the black dials on the Engine’s side until the arrows line up like train cars. Wonders if she would ever be brave enough to find out.
IV.
“OUR UNIVERSE,” SHE tells me, “is one microscopically thin thread, woven into a tapestry of infinite length and width. We march along it like a tightrope walker, never realizing that what lies to either side of us is not an abyss, but another world completely.”
We are standing at the edge of the wharf and waiting for the Burd Janet to dock. The seagulls slice through the salty air and chatter on the rocks below us; the boat is a sliver
of gray on the wider and rougher silver of the bay. She has taken my hand, turned it palm up, trapped my thumb beneath hers. Her other hands traces a green vein in my wrist.
“If we roll ever so gently from this thread to a parallel one,” she says, and she turns her finger suddenly, scraping it down the side of my arm, “we slip into another universe. One where the past is subtly changed. One where anything might have been different. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say. She smells like cardamon, like carnations and motor oil. She smells faintly of blood.
“We can only roll in one direction,” she says. She releases my wrist; when I do not pull away, she lowers her hands, stuffs them in the pockets of her long olive-colored coat. “You need to understand that. Once we go, we can never go back.”
Now we are standing on the deck of the Burd Janet, and the wind and streaks of gray are in her dark hair. She takes my hand again. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” I say. Every time, yes.
V.
HER LAB IS on the floor of the ocean, nestled in the arching ribcage of a dead whale. The abyssal scavengers have come and gone, sleeper sharks and hagfish, then crabs, mussels, octopi. Now we share the skeleton with neon-bright bacterial mats and blind sea worms. A whalefall creates its own ecosystem, carrying its oxygen and calories and sunlight down into the silent abyss. Even its bones, lipid-rich, can feed a tiny world.
The Burd Janet docks in a sleepy fishing village along a quiet and forgetful coast, where the continental shelf is narrow and steep, an ancient river having carved its canyon deep along the ocean floor. When you say the password to the one-eyed woman whose windows are filled with fishhooks, she leads you down to the wharf and hands you a key on a length of waxed red string. Trailing in the water beside the Burd Janet, its round door locked and sealed with rubber, is the submarine rover Tam Linn. It takes almost a full day of slow diagonal sinking from the place where the Burd Janet’s crew drop their nets; you know you’ve arrived when you see the green wires clamped to the pink-white bones, sparking deadly volts into the water.
Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Page 12