by Ben Peek
Nicholas would start screaming shortly after that.
All she had to do was call their names. They would stop the moment that she did that. They would see her projection and think that it was her and she would tell them what happened outside the airlock. But she didn’t. She stood in the shuttle, watching the two reach up for the airlock hatch and begin to play with it.
They looked so real.
But they weren’t. They were creations. They were grown from the sacks that Alrea nurtured, their bodies repaired, altered, and improved while they slept. They were creations, just like she was. Yes, the hands that pushed the buttons on the keypad had been so tiny and fragile, and they grew and aged, unlike her own hard, white hands. But the thin tendrils of Alrea altered them both in the same way, burrowing into flesh without permission. So, no matter that they aged and died, they were as real as she was, and that, as far as O. was concerned, was not real at all. That was why the sight of Zu’s body had aroused no reaction in her. Alrea could remake him, if it wanted. Life was nothing more than a puzzle, an intricate machine that was tinkered with—
In front of her, the airlock door ground open suddenly, shocking the two boys. In response, they jumped back, and Zu swore loudly. The boys burst out in laughter a moment later.
Despite herself, she smiled.
“Boys,” she said before she realized she had spoken, “you don’t want to do that.”
11.
When she returned, Zu was still dead.
“There was no change.” The astronaut was limp inside its tomb, Alrea’s disappointment so great that it could not even animate its hideous mask to talk to her. “You talked to them both and they left the shuttle, but here there was no change. He lay on the table as he does now.”
O. did not know what to say. Her back hurt, and there was a bitter sadness in her that had not been present before. It only intensified as she gazed down at Zu’s ravaged body and tried to process what had happened, and what was happening. When Alrea’s tentacles emerged and began digging into Zu’s broken skin, however, she turned and left the room.
Her aimless walk took her to the children, who lay in their rooms, still figures in sedation. She wasn’t surprised: Alrea had done the same thing when the other children had died.
After checking on them, she went to her own room and lay on the warm bed that was part of Alrea. There, she realized that she could not cry. It was the first time she could remember giving in to her grief since, over the years, any sadness she felt had quickly given away to anger and resentment. For a moment, tearless O. almost returned to the anger—but the image of Zu, grinning when he saw her inside the shuttle, thinking that she was there to share in the fun until she explained to him what would happen, returned. The image of his body was not far behind.
The next day, she said to Alrea, “I think there should be a funeral for the boy. Also, you should think about taking us back to Earth.”
In response, the room was cold, the tomb of the astronaut dark.
“They can’t stay here. You cannot keep them in a box forever.”
“Your tone is not appreciated.”
No pain followed, and O. pressed her advantage. “I’ve not got a tone—I’m just trying to help you avoid this again.”
There was silence, and she thought that the conversation was over, and indeed, turned to leave, when Alrea said, “There’s nothing on Earth.”
“There must be something?”
This time, there was no reply, and O. left the room, feeling as if she had, at least for the moment, changed the dynamic of their relationship. She was further validated two days later when a funeral took place for Zu. Her one concern was that she did not have time to prepare for it, either for herself, or the children. She had been directed by Alrea soon after rising, the children with her, into a pale blue lit corridor that opened into a room of coloured a sombre blue. Entirely new, a room she had never seen before, a part of itself that Alrea had created for the occasion, it was empty but for the dead boy laid out in the middle. Surprisingly, his body had been fixed, for a lack of a better term—the damage done by the atmosphere of Mars no longer detectable. Zu looked as if he were sleeping and O., while thankful, thought it a strange act of kindness on Alrea’s behalf.
The ceremony was short and simple. The children placed cards on top of Zu and, at the end, Alrea took the body into itself.
Afterward, when the children had returned to their rooms in a sombre procession, it told O. she would have to go back in time. “Twice.” The astronaut’s tomb was dark, so dark that only the edge of the broken glass could be seen. “The first time will be to when you were a child, the second to when you awoke here.”
“Why?”
“A precaution.”
“I don’t see why.” She argued, in part, because she could, but also because she did not want to feel the wires sink into her back with their burning touch. “It made no difference for Zu—”
“Did you see him, today?” Alrea interrupted.
“Of course.”
“I did not change him.” When O. made no reply, it continued, “I was as shocked to see him looking as he did, so much that I changed how the ceremony would end. Initially, I had planned to burn him, but instead, I kept him, watched, studied.”
“Is he—is he alive?”
“No.”
“But—”
“I don’t know what has happened,” Alrea said, a hint of desperation in its voice. “What I do know is that it appears that Zu died for no reason. Every part of him is healthy, perfect, but I cannot stimulate the brain, or get the heart to pulse. It is beyond my understanding, and may forever be, but I take the warning as it is given: time has its own laws, and we cannot break it, nor demand it to be different just because it would make our lives easier. We have to acknowledge it.”
There was an opportunity for her. That was what O. thought as the wires sank into her back. She was not quite sure what it was yet, but the relationship between her and Alrea had changed, that she was sure of. She might be able to change it more if she warned her younger self about Dan; if she spoke about her mother’s suicide; she could even warn her about Alrea. She knew, however, that even as she thought this, she was ignoring what she had been told, that time could not be changed, or altered—but that was not entirely true. Time could be altered and changed. Zu’s body showed that and, while, yes, the change was a cosmetic one, and did not hide the facts, did it not suggest that the potential to change her conditions existed?
Before her, a long tentacle placed a sharp, ugly knife on a small tray in front of her.
Then, she was standing in her old classroom.
Out the window, O. could see the overcast sky, and the sandy brick fence that ran around the school in a sign of its prosperity. The room was smaller than she remembered, however, and the tables tiny. She doubted that she could have sat in one of the chairs comfortably, while pulling herself up to one of the desks was out of question. Unable to do either, however, her gaze drifted across the security camera in the right hand corner of the room, and to the electric board that had only recently been replaced after the monitor component fizzled out on the previous; the posters and charts that the class itself had put up around the room were her final acknowledgment and the last of them was a map of the world, marked with red.
Behind her, the door opened.
“The infected areas are coloured red, right? It has been a while since I’ve seen one,” O said, not yet turning. “There is a theory that the virus is proof of alien life.”
There was no reply.
“It’s in this country already.” She turned, facing the child that she had once been: skinny, black, and with wild hair. “It’s in New Orleans, brought over by Baker Thomas. Right now, he leads in a small community of infected—the number is fifteen, if I remember right. It isn’t difficult for him to hide, but in ten years, it will be impossible to keep
his community a secret and he’ll have to take action. Just like you will with your uncle, Octavia.”
She used the name that had once been her own and found herself curiously detached from it and the girl before her. She recognised Octavia as herself, and could not deny it, but within herself was the quiet realization that the girl before her was long, long dead. O. was no longer her, no longer on the edge of a bumbling, confused sexuality that would only become more confused over the next years thanks to her uncle. And neither was she what the girl would grow up into: a woman who suffered from addiction and who placed herself in abusive, possessive relationships that stemmed from the early relationships with her uncle and mother.
“That’s why I know you’re early to school,” she said, finally. “It’s in your eyes.”
Octavia blinked in response.
Was I always this quiet? O. had never believed that she was, but as yet, her younger self had not said a word. Instead, Octavia stared at her with wide, brown eyes, fearful and distrustful, yet also wanting, and needing. That’s how her uncle made her feel: as if you were alone, as if you could not trust a single person anymore. The memory came back acutely as she stood there, and O. spoke about the dog fight.
She made no attempt to change the story, or to alter it, as she had thought that she would do so earlier. Instead, as she pulled the knife out, she was very aware of how much she didn’t belong there at that moment. Octavia’s life would be led; it had been finished for over a century, if O. was to believe what Alrea told her. Changing it would do, what, exactly? Give her black skin instead of white? Give her blood and ovaries? Over the years, O. had longed both to restore her identity, to give her a sense of place, to ground her reality in herself, to make her herself again.
But, standing there, before her younger self, she found it impossible to deny what had happened; it had made her, shaped her and what she did now, with Alrea and the children, was a direct response to it. Yes, she was a slave, a barren mother, and a black woman trapped in a shell. She hated it, but yet, she knew what Alrea knew when it had dug through Zu’s body: time, history, could not be ignored, could not be treated as if it were a minor thing that did not make them who they were. Changing it would not alter her problems. She would still want freedom for herself and the children.
The past was the past: it could not be corrected, she realized, just learned from.
In front of her younger self, O. placed the knife.
“Don’t forget this, yeah?”
She knew she wouldn’t.
12.
“Okay,” O. said, “but just one. Just one story out here before I leave.”
In the evening, she had built the campfire behind the back of the sprawling house, trying to make it as much as she remembered, with a ring of grey rocks around a shallow pit. The night before she had told the children that, yes, they could camp outside for the night, and she wanted—in what was a rare display of affection for her past—to give them the most picture perfect campsite that she could. By the following night, when dark had fallen, all sixteen children found sleeping bags around the fire, each of them sized to accommodate the youngest (five) and the eldest (seventeen). Before she had let the children out, however, she had made the oldest three girls and one boy look after the youngest for the night and to keep the peace, though she expected at least two of the children to run back to her, crying, after being picked on, or being scared. That was part of the experience of camping, too.
As was the story:
“The story I have is about a girl who was a vampire. She was no older than Mary—being, I mean, that she was eleven, a tiny, tiny girl with dark skin and wild, wild hair.” In front of her, the white skinned Mary’s eyes crinkled with amusement; she had heard the story before, O. knew, and had heard the vampire given different names, but that didn’t change the fact that she liked being singled out. “She had been born on Earth, and had grown up with her parents in a nice house, near a beach. She did not know that, however, when she woke up, because she awoke without a memory, without any idea of where she should be.
“Why, she could’ve been on Mars.”
The younger children laughed; the four older ones rolled their eyes. O. kept her smile to herself.
“When she awoke, she was hungry like she had never been, but she did not want food, not in the way you do. No sandwich, no pie, nothing you would eat would satisfy her: only blood would. Inside her head, her mind screamed BLOOD! BLOOD! worse than it had ever done in her entire life. This was partly because our young vampire had been hurt in a fire and was badly injured. Her need for blood came not because she was hungry, but because blood healed them, and she was in horrible pain. Normally, if our vampire found you or I, she would bite us just here, on our necks.” With her white hand—a hand that she still loathed to recognize as her own—she reached out to one of the young boys, Gerard, and pinched his dark skinned neck. “She would do it lightly, and it would be like a kiss, and she would take just a little to get by. But, it could hurt if a vampire drank too much. They could kill a human—which is exactly what would happen if this girl found you or I. She would grab us, grab us by the neck and bite deeply, and harshly, and drink us dry.
“Sadly, this is what happened to the young man who found her lying on the ground. He touched her shoulder to see if she was alive and she grabbed him, breaking his bones with her grip as she tore chunks of skin out of his neck.”
Every eye was on O., while behind her, the shuttle that Alrea had crashed into the surface of Mars lay in a pale orange light, ten minutes across the grass field that lay between it and the house. It was a walk that the children made every morning for class, where they learned about math, science, literature, painting, and anything else that Alrea deemed important. In the halls, they walked in Alrea’s warm skin, spoke with its voice—gone was the horrific visage of the last Baker Thomas and his astronaut’s suit—and then left, to walk across Alrea’s grass, breath its air, and live in as much freedom as they could have.
As they were given.
“Afterwards, she felt terrible,” O. continued. “She had never meant to kill him, and knew it was wrong to take life. Worse, she had broken one of the vampires’ most sacred rules, which was that she had fed without consent, and the blood in her stomach was tainted and awful because of it. A vampire, even a hungry, hurt one, was subject to the same rules that you and I are part of. To drink from someone without consent, to kill them before their time, was something that a vampire should never do, just as you or I should not kill someone, or force them to do something against their will, and just as we would feel bad for doing so, so was she. Our vampire was violently ill and vomited all over the grass she stood on.”
She was subverting the nature of vampires, making it a moral that she could use to seed in the children notions of what was right and wrong. Soon, she would introduce an evil vampire who wanted to control humans and treat them like cattle. It was he who had hurt the young girl, and he who she and her friends would fight against at the end. But, before that, O. would tell the children how the vampire needed her companions, all of them human, to survive. That she was talking in part about Alrea would escape all but the eldest, and Alrea itself, but the latter had been losing its control and power since she had returned from her third and final trip in time, wherein she had sat in the room and listened to herself retell the story she knew so well.
After she had left herself outside Alrea’s door, she had returned, and since then, fought for her independence. The house and atmosphere she had was part of it, but she was not free, not yet, not completely. Her methods in fighting, however, changed, and she found herself looking just not at herself, but at the children she raised. They were her battleground, and she fought Alrea within them, subverting the stories of her youth and of Earth’s past, to ensure that they understood the necessity for freedom, that they could fight Alrea, and that together they could assure not just their freedom, but that th
e events that had brought them to this point, did not happen again.
theleeharveyoswaldband
“My band is not here. They’ve left. They’ve gone. That’s why it’s just me on the stage tonight. I’m going to try and make it work for you all anyway.”
Years later, Zarina Salim Malik would write that it was these words that changed her life. It was impossible to think that at the time: the vowels of each word were slurred, mashed together, and lost within the heavy, deep bass voice that emerged from crackling speakers. But it was true. It would change her life. There was a magnetic quality that allowed the musician’s voice to rise over the chinks of glass and snatches of conversation and reach her and the other fifty New Yorkers in the Annandale Bar with a tone that implied that he mattered. That they should listen. It was a tone that ignored the fact that the audience present was not there because they cared for the opening act, but because they wanted prime choice in space for the later band they had actually paid to see, and because they had a dedication to music that had nothing to do with any individual performer or act. But the voice ignored that.
The stage in the Annandale was at the end of a small, shadow stained rectangular box of a room with a dirty wooden floor. It had metal fans against the left side that did nothing to cool the place down when it was full and opposite these was a bar where students worked for cheap wages and stole liquor but never cleaned. The whole room lingered in the taste and smell of cigarettes, beer and sweat. It was a shithole, but the bands were cheap and when the music mingled with her pulse, Zarina didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the music. But when that voice snagged the part of her mind that went on instinct, something different happened. She had never felt an intensity like this before, and she watched the shadows of the stage as the musician dragged a stool to the front; watched as the electronics squealed and drowned out everyone, then faded; watched even when Sara, slender, cute, blonde Sara in black and green and Japanese tattoos down her spine, that Sara, began to speak and she ignored her. In fact, Zarina leaned over, ashed into the half filled metal tray they had been sharing, then stood—herself in black and red and an inch shorter than Sara, with only one tattoo of a sun coloured butterfly on her neck that her long black hair hid—and she said, “I’m going up front.”