Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  What were we supposed to learn, from girls?

  The women in our house kept coming. Some of them lived just down the street now, in houses where the owners were killed or deported for being part of the resistance. When I asked one of the women if she ever got lonely in the big house, she said no, she never got lonely.

  “I live with my sisters,” she said.

  “Why don’t they do your laundry?” I said.

  My brother was shining her boots. My mother looked up sharply, but I didn’t care. I was the man of the house. I could say what I wanted.

  The woman just laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

  Some time later, I met a girl at school I liked, and she liked me, I think. But the next year, she left school because she wanted to join the new fighting squad that the women had started. Girls were allowed to join when they were fourteen. I got angry when she told me she was going.

  “What,” I said, “you want to learn how to kill people like those women do? You’ll be just like them.”

  She glared at me. Black eyes, like my mother’s. “They won,” she said. “It won’t be so bad to be like someone who wins, will it?”

  “Won? What did they win?”

  “Everything,” she said.

  I left school, even though it made my mother angry. I got a job unloading fishing boats in the bay. There were mostly men down there, though the women were posted around as guards and they had put a bunch of girls in charge of customs. Those women made a lot more money than any of us working the boats.

  I once heard one of the men say something nasty to the customs girls. He called them whores, and traitors, and said he could fuck the traitor out of them. He said it in front of two women working as customs guards. One of the women pulled out her gun and shot him. I still stayed on in my mother’s house.

  Father’s health got worse. We lost more and more of him to opium.

  I sat with him one hot night during the monsoon season. All of the windows were open, letting in the rain, but he wouldn’t let me close the house up.

  Mother had taken my brother to the hospital. He had an infection in his lungs.

  “I have such dreams,” my father said. He reached for my hand. I let him take it. His hand was cold and clammy in mine, despite the heat.

  “I dream that the women came from another world,” he said. “They came on boats made of spice and spun sugar. We disappointed them. They’re too hungry for us.” He turned his blank stare to me. “They’re going to eat us.”

  There was a new woman on watch at customs. She looked at me only once, but I couldn’t help but follow her with my eyes. She was big and tall like the others, and her face and hands were broad. She had a dark complexion and tilted green eyes, like jade. She looked twenty. I wasn’t even sixteen. I didn’t think she noticed me. But she caught me heading home and said, “The streets are not safe for boys. I’ll bring you home.”

  She was a head taller than me, but she moved like water. We walked through the maze of deserted streets bordering the harbor and passed under a gaslight. She suddenly took me by the arm and pulled me into a dark alley. I choked on a cry. She pressed me against the gritty wall of an abandoned warehouse and shoved her hand down the front of my trousers. I struggled, but didn’t say anything. Her big body and long coat shielded me from the street. No one could see me. No one at the dock. Not my mother. Not my father.

  I gripped the back of her neck, dug my fingers into her hair. She pulled me into her.

  When I saw her again, she was with a group of women by the customs house. I nodded at her. She turned to the other women, said something in their language.

  The women all looked at me. They laughed.

  All of the women kept looking at me. They kept laughing. I had to leave the docks.

  I got a job driving mortar trucks through the gates. Most of the women had given up those jobs by then. They were all working in government and security positions.

  During the day, I went to the ruins of old houses. I could still smell the yeast of old bursts. I shoveled up all the raw material and loaded it into the truck. I met other young men like me. I met men who had wanted to be teachers and doctors. It was the women, they said, who held them back. The women took all of the jobs. The women were too intimidating. The women owned the world.

  One night, I drove my mortar truck through the gate and stopped at the big pit where the bodies and rubble were heaped. The women had bombed out the original government offices, long before. They used the deep pit left behind as a waste dump. I sat in the truck and stared out at the pit for a long time.

  I got home sometime just before midnight.

  My mother sat alone in the dark living room. She sat staring into the empty fireplace. A pile of neatly folded laundry sat at her hip. Shirts hung on the line in the kitchen.

  “Do you want some light?” I asked her.

  She was very still.

  “Is father all right?” I asked.

  “He’s passed,” she said. Her dishrag lay in her lap. She did not touch it.

  I went upstairs. Father lay in bed. A single gas lamp flared, casting dark shadows. There was a bloody, clotted smear against the far wall. Half of father’s head was gone. I saw the gun near his limp hand. His eyes were still open.

  He had left no note.

  Some women came to collect the body, though a man drove the body truck. One of the women turned to me just before they left. “We all battle dragons,” she said. “There’s no shame in losing.”

  “There’d be no battle,” I said coldly, “without the dragons.”

  She grinned, slid her hat back on. “There will always be dragons,” she said. “It’s only a matter of who plays the dragon, who plays the sheep. Which would you rather be?”

  I spent the rest of the night in the market square, watching the women. Sunrise rent the sky like the remnants of a red dress. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a red dress. I didn’t miss them.

  I watched the changing of the guard. I bought a newspaper. It was in two languages now, ours and the women’s. I kept turning the page back and forth, back and forth, but I could see no difference between one and the other.

  All the news was the same.

  If Women Do Fall They Lie

  This is one of my favorite stories, and the least popular with readers. It was published by Deep Outside SFFH in 2001, just a few months after I’d come home from the Clarion West writers’ workshop. At the time, it felt like a major win. I couldn’t believe anybody had seen fit to pay for this odd little story about screwed up gender politics and birthing compounds and organic weapons. However, there’s also a lot of deep-seated unease with being female here, which translates to outright misogyny in the narrator. All purposeful, yes, but also uncomfortable. When what you are is hated and powerless, you’ll do anything to disassociate yourself from it – even participate in the oppression of your own kind.

  They told me the vessel could dream. I told them that was no concern of mine because vessels are of the dirt and of the desert and live only to sweat and breed and die, and I am a teacher of men and androgynies and Kell progeny. I am a man of wisdom and reason and worth. Vessels are no longer my concern.

  “But Kadru,” they said, “she can dream.”

  I told them it was foolish to utilize me this way; I questioned their purpose.

  It was not my place to question them, they said.

  And they sent me to the desert.

  If you have never been to the desert, you must know that the sun casts an orange shadow across the craggy red hills and sunken pits and gullies of this part of the world. The vessel’s world. The red desert looks endless here, and touches the gray-blue of the sky in all directions. The agricultural compounds are here, stained the same color as the desert, and it is here the vessels grow the starches that feed the cities. Here the vessels labor until they are old enough to breed. When I stepped out of the transport vehicle and onto the red sand I thought
of blood and remembered the fluids of the vessels, remembered their filth, their stink, and I hated the vessel that dreamed. I hated her because she had brought me back to this dirty terrestrial place. The dormitory mothers led me inside the compound. I traveled alone, and they did not understand this. They talked of the arrival of “the others.” They expected the Kell. A man, they believed, was not sufficient to understand their vessel’s complication. I was not angry with them. The mothers are vessels; cleaner, stronger, perhaps, than the younger ones, but still they exist only to work and sweat and die. They will never leave the desert.

  The vessel was housed inside the cell of one of the dormitory mothers.

  “She cannot sleep with the others,” they told me. “She cries out at night and wakes them. It is because of the dreams.” Their desert sculpted faces tilted up to look at me, and I pretended not to see the red dust crusted in the wrinkles of their dark faces.

  There was no door to the cell. I saw the vessel squeezed up into one corner of the room, one sun-browned arm flung across her face; her skinny, scabby legs pulled up close to her chest. The brown sheet was rumpled. Her hair was black, straight, unwashed. I wondered if they had deloused her before I arrived.

  “Leave me with the vessel,” I said, and the dormitory mothers nodded and scurried back out to attend the vessels working in the starch fields and irrigation ditches.

  The dormitory floor was hard and smooth. I stepped into the cell, stood only a few inches from the bed. A base creature, I thought. But she can dream, they told me.

  “Vessel?” I said. “What do they call you?”

  She lifted her skinny head. I wondered if the dormitory mothers were feeding her. She looked close to breeding age. The Kell would come for her soon.

  “Daeva Four,” she said, and her voice was soft, afraid, childish. “I am told that you dream.”

  Her eyes were not brown; they were black, black like the bottom of a deep well. Tears flowed out from the edges of her black eyes, made lazy lines in the fine coat of red dust on her brown face.

  “What do you dream?” I said.

  More tears. More wet. More base emotion.

  “I dream of the ocean,” she said.

  Of course you do, I thought. That is where all your kind will end. But this vessel had never seen the ocean. The ocean was on the other side of the world, and none but the Kell and androgynies had ever seen the ocean. I had only read of it.

  “And what does the ocean look like?” I said.

  “It’s all water,” she said, “ditch water that’s blue, not red, not brown, not muddy. All blue. And things live there, inside it.”

  “If you can dream, Daeva Four, then you can lie.” The ocean was not so impossible a thing for her to believe she had seen. The Kell could have discussed it among themselves the last time they came to pick out the breeders from the ripened vessels.

  But a vessel that could dream could do more than just dream. She could tell her own stories. She could lie.

  I told her to tell me a story that wasn’t true.

  Her big black eyes stared up at me, and the tears ceased, and I watched as the watery trails began to dry on her cheeks. I wondered again if she had been deloused.

  “You want me to lie?” she said, and there was awe in her voice.

  “If you can,” I said.

  “Any lie?” she said.

  “Any lie.”

  Her gaze met mine, that wet, onyx black gaze that was so repulsive, so other, and she said, “I’m a woman.”

  Some part of me recoiled at that word. “Who told you that word?” I said, and my voice came out loud, far louder than I expected, and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of apprehension. I did not allow myself to recognize why, not then.

  This was not just a vessel that could lie. She was a vessel who remembered a dead past.

  “It’s a word I dreamed,” she said, and she pushed herself up against the wall, clasped her arms around her knees, hugged them closer to her chest. I saw the tears begin to return to her eyes. Not again, I thought. No more wet weakness.

  “Fine,” I said, and talked in a soft, even voice now, as I would talk to any other fearful creature. “Fine, it is a word you dreamed.”

  She dreams of oceans and -- I could not even think the other word without shuddering. Daeva Four could dream. Daeva Four could remember, and she could probably lie as well.

  I knew I had to take her to the Kell.

  The vessel had not been deloused. I learned this from the dormitory mothers when I asked that they wash her and prepare her for transport. I went back to my vehicle and sprayed myself in anti-parasitic spray as I called the androgynies at the city center and told them Daeva Four could dream. They arranged a meeting with the Kell city leader Ro Bhavesh.

  The dormitory mothers presented the washed vessel to me. I put her in the vehicle. I had to sit across from her. My skin crawled.

  The vehicle closed, the steely compound gate opened, and I entered our destination into the navigation console. All this time the vessel stared at me. She began to cry. I ignored her.

  I would need a bath and disinfectant rinse, and with that I would wash away the last trace of this encounter with the vessels and the desert and the dusty, wrinkled faces of the dormitory mothers. Ro Bhavesh would deal with this vessel. Daeva Four was a Kell complication, not a man’s.

  The Kell, however, still did not appear to understand that I was better utilized elsewhere. When our vehicle arrived, two tall androgynies met me on the landing space and said, “You’re to take the vessel to Ro Bhavesh.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but androgynies never meet the protestings of a man with anything more than stoic androgynous silence. I have much experience with this. I closed my mouth.

  The sky in Sapan that day was lavender, the leaves of the slender trees lining the sidewalks an orange-peppered yellow. Tomorrow I hoped they would be green. The orange made me think of the sun in the desert. Here in Sapan the streets were white, the buildings blue and gray and deep green, and the vessel and I were the only things here that carried dirt and contagion with us. The city air ate away at that contamination as I entered. I felt the conditioning system pump air out around me and the vessel, the microscopic machinated nits devouring the dust and decay on my face and arms and clothing. The vessel scratched absently at her skin, as if she sensed the cleansing of her body’s filth.

  Clerks and officials and smooth-faced boys selling sealed containers of starches stared as the vessel and I passed. I almost hoped no one would guess that she traveled with me, but she stayed so close behind that she could belong to no one else.

  I came to Ro Bhavesh’s spherical white tower and was admitted without trouble. The vessel and I were ushered into the Kell’s meeting room by two androgynies. We stood in front of Ro Bhavesh. All this time the vessel had said nothing, but when she saw Ro Bhavesh seated in the tall white sculpted chair her black eyes grew wide and she cried out, “I saw you in my dream!”

  Ro Bhavesh smiled. I had seen few Kell smile, and when this one did, it struck me that seeing this Kell smile was very pleasing to the eye. The Kell are not so different from men in appearance, and all that separates them from us is their lack of fluid and excretion. No sweat, no blood, certainly no tears. The Kell are the ascendant; they are all that the base vessels are not and never will be.

  Standing before this tall, slender Kell, its face so smooth and impassive, the eyes without moist sheen, the hair orange and wrapped about the scalp with impeccable precision, I remembered that I stood now somewhere between Kell and vessel, between ascendance and baseness, and I hated this vessel again for her presence, and her dreams, and her lies.

  “You say you saw me in a dream, vessel?” Ro Bhavesh said.

  “I dreamed you, and you told me stories,” the vessel said.

  “And what stories did I tell?” Ro Bhavesh said.

  “You told me stories of women,” the vessel said.

  I watched the smile fade from Ro Bha
vesh’s clean, ageless face. For a moment, I wondered if I should not have brought the vessel here. I wondered if I should have destroyed her in the desert.

  “I apologize,” I said. “I have heard no vessel utter such a word. I believed it would be -”

  The Kell held up its hand. “Enough, Kadru. Am I correct in saying that you are intimately familiar with cases such as this?”

  I thought of the desert, and of my youth - and again, my skin crawled. “I have. I excelled at the selection of breeders, laborers, and genetic flaws. I did my work well, and was rewarded for it. I enjoy my place in the city.”

  And if you send me out into the desert again, I will perish, I thought, but I did not alter my expression.

  “What do you make of this vessel, then?” Ro Bhavesh said, and its gaze stayed on the vessel who stared back at it.

  “From what she says it appears she is not a teller of lies or stories so much as she is a teller of past truth. Most vessels are incapable of lies -- past or present -- unless they are persuaded to believe them as truth, but I have known genetic anomalies who carry the past within them, passed down from one casting to the next. She is a fourth casting. Someone felt it necessary to continue the breeding and growth of this mix beyond one casting. Perhaps they hoped this genetic storage of racial memory would manifest itself.” I hesitated. “She dreamed also of the ocean.”

  Ro Bhavesh looked at me. I saw only cold Kell calculation in its face, the efficient rational thought of a mechanized ascendant. “Perhaps, then, we should take her there, and discover how much truth of the past she knows.”

  My first thought was to question its use of the term “we.” My second thought was to wonder why Ro Bhavesh felt it necessary to question a vessel at the ocean. Did it expect to receive different answers in Sapan than it would receive at the ocean?

  “Ro Bhavesh,” I said, “do you think it is necessary to -”

  “You question too much,” Ro Bhavesh said.

  The voice was without emotion, without inflection, but I was chilled by it. Ro Bhavesh nodded. It was decided. I was to travel to the ocean.