by Meg Elison
Settle was a fairly large city even then, all those years ago. I can’t believe how many are there now. The last few times I’ve gone over to do any training, it’s been totally overwhelming. Thousands, packed all over that narrow strip of land across the sea.
But when we arrived back then, the city was full of plague. We came to the docks and tried to moor, but there were signs up all over, plus masked people warding us off.
It was absolute chaos beyond. Some of the people in masks were clearly ill themselves. Some of the signs said “Yellow Fever,” others said “Scarlet Fever” or simply “POX” in three huge, ominous letters.
Alice took one look at that and disappeared belowdecks. There was no way we could expose her to that, even if we had wanted to try. But we had been at sea for so long. Supplies of anything but fish and salt were dangerously low, so we had to press on.
Someone at the docks told us to try the islands. There were so many, Bodie simply pointed and headed for one. It turned out to be Bambritch.
There was almost no structure here when we arrived. Just a handful of folks living and fishing and farming together. Connie was so excited to see people who weren’t actively waving us off, they slipped on the way down the ladder and ended up soaked. It was Hortensia who took us in that night, who fed us and put us in front of her fire. She had an old-world stethoscope and she handed it over to Alice, who found her child’s fluttering heartbeat within seconds.
Connie and I took a house, the same house I live in now. Alice and Bodie took another. Connie was at their house constantly, waiting on Alice hand and foot, bringing her little treasures they had bartered for with their drawings.
Alice indulged Connie. At the time, I thought it was sweet of her, but now I know it was too much. Too much. I had no idea how far it would go.
They were sleeping over there, hovering over Alice every day as her time drew nearer. They were sketching her day and night, avoiding me or anyone else. They hated to be away from Alice for any reason.
In one of our rare moments alone, Alice looked at me with the raw, hunted expression of an animal. Her skin looked thin and bruised, and the darkness under her eyes made them like wells in her face.
“They keep asking me the same questions,” she said, looking around the room to make sure Connie wasn’t there. “I’ve explained everything a thousand times. I got a medical textbook from the library, showed them the parts and the fetal development timeline and everything. They just keep telling me that that can’t be how it happens. There’s nothing I can do to convince them. It’s starting to scare me a little.”
I tried not to frown too hard. Connie was stubborn, that was clear. But why argue with the reality of conception? What would be the point?
“What are they driving at?” I asked her. “Is it jealousy or just ignorance?”
“Neither,” Alice said, swallowing hard and looking around again. “They think I fragged myself.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, scoffing and settling back in my chair. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” I picked up my cup of pine-needle tea and found it cold but still agreeable. “They can’t really think that.”
Alice shrugged. “I don’t know what they can think,” she said. “We don’t really know where they came from, Flora. They might have been damaged somehow as a child, so that this will never make sense. Maybe they need to believe in something impossible because of what they are.”
I bristled a little at the “what they are” comment. People in Bambritch had been fairly accepting of Connie, but there were a few who could not get used to calling them “they.” There were still others who laughed at or embroidered on Connie’s personal history, because they have never heard of a guevedoces here. I’ve never heard of one anywhere else, but that shouldn’t matter. It’s Connie’s body and they were there when it happened. The truth of it belonged to them.
Connie came of the age to start being interested in someone sexually, but they never seemed to look at anyone that way except Alice. If Alice had wanted to bring them into her Hive back then, I’d have opposed it. Connie was too young to be with anyone in that way. But I couldn’t have stopped it.
“That doesn’t matter,” I told her. “Everybody has a body, every body has a story. Plenty of children have trouble believing anything we tell them about babies, because the stories are so inconsistent and mixed with rumor. And the books we have don’t predict how many will die in childbirth, or seem to understand how rare and dangerous it is. They come from another world.”
Alice nodded. “That’s it exactly. They tell me that those old-world books can’t predict this. That we’ve become something else than what we were. They say the future is frags. I don’t know what to say to that.”
She and I had spoken many, many times on the necessity of teaching some science to the kids. We wanted the children of Bambritch to be able to read and write, but they needed to know how the world worked, as well. Alice had stressed to me time and time again that it was impossible to teach her trade to a youngster who had no basic understanding of life science, the body, the world of plants, or even the difference between applying heat and applying cold.
Not understanding these basic processes was what let people fall into abject superstition, believing that they needed to make sacrifices or offer some kind of ritualized devotion in order to be fed or be safe. There are hundreds of people in Settle who wear the bones of plague dead in order to ward off the sickness themselves. Without any science, they match like to like and assume that these charms and nonsense will work. It’s that kind of ignorance that allows plague to spread, because they won’t listen to people like Alice who talk about germ theory, sterilization, or even properly washing their hands.
When Connie came back, I told them they had to come home with me that night.
“Why?” they whined.
I looked them over. They had the barest patch of hair on their upper lip. They were sleeping more and more, and seemed to constantly be in a mood. The change was heavy on them; I could smell them every time they were near.
“Because I miss you,” I said, not wanting to tell them that Alice was exhausted and nearly due, and she wanted them out of her hair.
“Fine,” they growled. “Bye, Alice!”
She waved to them over her shoulder, already headed out.
We walked home. The way was short, but I wasn’t sure how to begin, so we arrived there before I had figured out what to say.
We sat at our kitchen table. The house reminded me of my little place in Jeff City. The kitchen was cheery, on the back of the house and flooded with sunlight. The night was quiet; it wasn’t warm enough yet for frogs or bugs. There was nothing but humming silence between the two of us.
I cooked us eggs in crushed tomatoes and herbs, and I still had bread. This was their favorite, always. We sat down and I watched them begin to shovel it in. I managed a few bites, but my stomach was flipping and churning. I was fairly certain this was going to be a fight, but I didn’t know how bad it would get.
“So, you know Alice is telling you the truth, right?”
“What do you mean?” They slurped up a whole egg and burst the yolk in their mouth. I had seen them do it a hundred times, but tonight it seemed somehow predatory, like watching a snake raid a bird’s nest.
“When she tells you how she got pregnant, that’s the actual story. That is how absolutely everyone who has ever gotten pregnant ended up that way.”
“That’s not true,” they said, raking a piece of bread through the red trench of tomatoes and bringing it to their mouth. “In the books, it says there used to be lots of ways. A doctor could help. Or people could take semen from someone and do it all alone.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “Alright, yes. You’re right. In the old world, there were more ways to do it.”
Another slurp. “And now, there might be new ways.”
“Connie, there is no such thing as fragging.”
They looked up
at me, and I saw such a stranger in their eyes that I nearly gasped. I did not know them as well as I thought I did. I had taken so much for granted when they came to be with me that I think I constructed the child I wished I’d had, rather than the one I really got. I miscalculated badly. I will never be free of that.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Connie said, their eyes narrowing in contempt.
“I do, actually. I’ve been around a lot longer than you,” I said, trying to keep their attention.
They ran right over me. “I know you’re running a little library and making your little stump speeches about teaching kids science, using soap, and dissecting worms. While you were doing all that, I was really learning. Look.”
They got up and stalked away from the table. They came back with a book they had stuffed full of loose notes and sketches. It was a biology text, with all of their work packed into two sections. They opened it in front of me.
“Human evolution,” they said. “We change when the environment pressures us to change. Life since the Dying has been nothing but pressure, and pressure in this one specific thing. So why wouldn’t this change?”
I had no answer for that, but I dug deep. “Change like that takes a long time.”
“No it doesn’t.” They flipped the pages to a story about moths in a smoked-out town turning from white to black and back again.
“People aren’t moths,” I said. “We live longer. We breed slower.”
“Doesn’t matter,” they said, flipping forward again. “What matters is this.”
They spread their hand over the book, showing me a two-page spread in that crumbling volume. The page was titled “Asexual Reproduction, Parthenogenesis, and Uniparental Offspring.”
I looked it over. “Connie, these are lizards. Worms. Fish. People are something else entirely.”
“Are we?” They smirked. “Don’t we eat and shit and fuck just like them? Don’t we die just like them? Is it really that impossible?”
Staring directly into Connie’s eyes, I made the leap. “Is this about you, my living child? Are you thinking that the change that made you is at work as a force in others, giving them the power to frag like this? Is that what you’re hoping? Because the thing that made you was nothing bad. You don’t have to prove it can do this to redeem it, or to make it good.”
Their face fell. “I’m not trying to explain myself,” they sputtered. “Or you. Or Eddy. Or Hortensia, even. I’m trying to see what’s next for us. I’m trying to see a world without slavers, where women don’t have to be kept so that men can be sure that they’ll breed.”
“That isn’t why they do it,” I said, deadly quiet. “I know that because I was a slave, and that was never going to be possible for me.”
“You don’t know what’s possible,” Connie spat back. “It doesn’t make any sense to keep slaves without believing that some lasting good will come of it.”
I sighed. “Connie, people just do things that don’t make sense. Not everything lines up neatly and evens out at the end. Sometimes we are just like fish or worms or lizards, doing things without thinking, just going on instinct.” I tapped my finger on the page, below Parthenogenesis. “Sometimes we’re not.”
They reached down and snapped the book shut. “You’re never going to understand this.”
“Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you.”
They left the room and I could hear them packing a bag. I walked to the foot of the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“Out,” they said. “You can’t stop me because you don’t own me. I’m old enough to be on my own.”
I swallowed, my throat suddenly a knotted rope. “Where will you go?”
“My own place,” they said behind muffling walls. “I can’t stand to be around you anymore. You’re so ignorant. You’re so closed-minded.”
“Connie,” I said, trying to keep my heart out of my mouth. “Sleep on it. In the morning, you’ll make a better decision.”
“Morning will find me somewhere else,” they said, their voice haughty.
Nothing soothes a breaking heart like anger, so I found mine. “Alice doesn’t want you over there,” I told them. “She says you’re exhausting and scary.”
They appeared at the top of the steps, bag in hand. “She did not say that,” they breathed.
Oh, I had struck the heart of them. I wish I hadn’t, but in the moment I was glad I did.
“She did. She doesn’t want you, Connie. She’s a grown woman, and she’s got Bodie. Even if she does want a Hive, she won’t have you in it. You’re never going to be with her like that.”
“Why not?” Connie asked, their nostrils suddenly flaring. “They weren’t that picky about being with you. And what even are you? What could you offer her?”
I felt like they had punched me in the gut, but I didn’t flinch.
“I’m an adult,” I said. “I’m Flora. And I’m your mother.”
“You’re not my mother, you’re nobody’s mother. You could never do what she’s doing. You’re dead inside. Cut. A useless cut thing.”
That was the end, and I could take no more. I got out of their way and they went through the door.
I went looking for them two days later, expecting to find them at Alice’s, where they always ran when they were angry or upset. I was trying to keep the custom from Nowhere of allowing a person in childbed the privacy they would need to grieve if all did not go well, but I could not wait any longer. Word reached me on the street that the Mother and child had both lived, and I walked over in a haze of joy to find Alice in bed with a newborn, very tired but alright.
“Why didn’t you call for me?” I asked her, taking the tiny pink babe out of her arms.
“I thought Connie would tell you,” she said sleepily.
“Connie? Are they here?”
She yawned, nodding. “They were. They came here while I was in labor. They wanted to watch the birth, but I said no. Bodie had to scare them away from our window. That kid. I figured they would go home and tell you about it.”
I didn’t say anything. I touched the perfect silky folds under Alice’s baby’s chin. “What are you going to name her?”
“Poppy,” Alice said dreamily, already falling asleep. “I’ve been growing her my whole life.”
I waited one more day before letting go of whatever it was—pride, anger, I don’t know—before openly asking around the island to find out where Connie was. I spoke to everyone I knew they were friends with and moved outward from there. Everyone told me the same thing: they hadn’t seen Connie. Connie was obsessed with Alice and the pregnancy, Connie couldn’t talk about anything else.
Everyone was soon in that same condition. They came from all over the island, bringing Alice and Poppy and Bodie food and old-world goods and presents and home-brewed wine and liquor. They toasted the child and touched Alice for luck. Poppy was welcomed over and over; people whispered her name like it was a cure for hopelessness. She wasn’t the first child born on Bambritch, but it had been a while. She was a beacon of hope.
Finally, someone told me that Connie had left on a crab boat the day that Poppy was born. We gained one and lost one. Alice got her living child and I lost mine. I kept thinking they would come back. They didn’t.
Dozens of seasons passed. Alice had more children. I had lovers who came and went. I never had another living child. I was never sure I could do any better than I had done with my lost Connie.
It’s not yet dawn, but I know it will be today. This army will arrive today. They may make our shore, or they may fire on us from across the water.
I’m sure now. It’s been in all my dreams and banging on the back door of my heart since I first heard the stories. Since one or two refugees told me that the army said they were looking for a person named Flora. I’ve known the world wasn’t wide and there aren’t that many people in it. I’ve seen Eddy find Errol and still I tried to deny that there’s something that drags pe
ople back together in this world. I haven’t wanted to face it, but now I know it as well as I’ve ever known anything: Connie will be with the army. This obsession with frags, this continual drive toward our little island, can mean nothing else. They’re coming home to me, and they’re trying to make a point. They always let things build up until they were ready to explode. They never were much for subtlety; I don’t think I should be surprised at all that they want to tell me their feelings with tanks.
I’m ready. My living child, I’m ready. My death, I’m ready. But not for the end of us. I am not ready for that. Today, my book goes into the trunk and the trunk goes into the ground. Today, I take a drink of that old-world liquor and try to steel my nerves for what’s ahead. Today, I put all my life and work behind me and face the unknown thing.
Today, I am Flora and this book is my life. Tomorrow, only one of those things will be true.
CHAPTER 41
BAMBRITCH ISLAND
The mosquito whine of the airplane motor droned closer and closer in the pink light of dawn.
Zill and her helpers had done their part; they had gotten every boat between Settle and Bambritch moved, hidden, or scuttled. The harbor was clear and the sea between was like glass.
Zill climbed up the spotting tower and handed her spyglass over to Flora without a word. Flora’s gaze swept up and down the railing, looking the army over. There were thousands of bodies arranged on the opposite side, taking up their entire view of Settle’s coast. Behind them, Flora counted four tanks, all with huge mounted guns. Wagons and trucks numbering in the dozens. And the airplane.
Flora looked this over carefully, seeing that the engines were running but that it was chained to the back of a large vehicle so that it could be towed. The chains were not new and not easy to remove. There was no way they intended to fly it. It was very likely they just didn’t know how.
Hortensia joined them, followed by Carol and Eva.