Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

by Walidah Imarisha

  “Did the seed look like this?” Ó drew the shape of a canoe with a tall sail protruding from the middle of it.

  “Yes, mama! Just like that! This part was a beautiful color, blue but—” She tried to think what to compare it to. She had only known color by the light of fire, so all color had a warmth to it that her dreams sometimes did not possess.

  “Was the blue softer?”

  “It was a strong blue. Cooler, I guess. And this part was white but much brighter,” she said pointing to the sail.

  “Was there anything else?”

  “When Jaiku appeared, the ground began to shake, a silent shaking that stirred the spirits within. I saw thousands of them lift upward and all at once come for me.”

  “Sleep now, Mikra, you will need your strength. We have a long journey ahead of us.”

  That very night Ó prepared her birds for flight. She opened the turtle-like shell that rested on her back and hundreds of birds flew out, leaving behind a trail of glittering light that cut through the darkness. She opened her arms and threw white powder up into the heavens as they flew in circles above her. She spoke with thunder in her voice.

  “Tell Jaiku to come.”

  Hollow

  Mia Mingus

  West was almost done with her shift when she heard the loud sound of the long buzzer. Walking out into the hall with her cane, she could see the flashing orange lights, signaling a new Arrival was in the hatch. It had been almost fifty years since West first started working at the hatch and still, each time the buzzer rang, she could feel her heart beat a little faster. Her steps quickened, and she hurriedly entered the receiving room. Counting down the seconds, she leaned her cane against the shelf behind her and stood waiting for the small light next to the opening handle to turn from red to green.

  After a few minutes, the light changed colors, and West firmly grabbed the handle on the large door and turned it with one quick motion, releasing it and sliding it upward. Inside she could see the large oval vessel just beyond the door. Slowly she unlatched the bottom of the hatch and pulled, sliding it out, so that the vessel sat directly waist-high in front of her. Locking it in place, she retrieved a key from the wall and inserted it into the hole at the top of the vessel. Then she returned the key to its place as circular lights lit up around the keyhole, and a moment later the top half of the vessel slid open, revealing its contents.

  West reached in and pulled out a thick bundle of white blankets showing only the tiny face of the sleeping baby inside. West smiled down at the infant, gently pulling back the blankets and softly touching the infant’s cheeks. West breathed a deep sigh of relief. This one had made the long journey from Earth. It was still alive and breathing peacefully. She hugged the baby close to her, rocking it slightly from side to side.

  A new Arrival.

  The door opened behind her and West turned to see Seva greet her with a smile.

  “A new one?” Seva asked.

  “Just came in.” West opened her arms so Seva could see the baby. Seva peered in quietly at the sleeping face and sighed.

  “Here,” West offered. “You take the little one. I’ll clean up in here. I was about to leave anyway.” She handed Seva the baby and opened the door for her. As she turned to begin cleaning up, she could hear Seva softly singing to the infant as she made her way down the hall, her small voice echoing as the door closed. West smiled to herself. Seva had such a sweet spot in her heart for the Arrivals.

  West began to gather the extra blankets that had fallen to the floor. Leaning on her cane, she pulled them up before she noticed the envelope sticking out from between the cloth. She froze as her breath caught in her chest. Putting the blankets down, she picked up the envelope, a cautious look on her face. They had never, in all their time here, received a communication in any of the vessels.

  She sharply examined the envelope, flipping it over in her hands. It was from Earth, addressed to the General. After glancing back at the closed door, West quickly opened the envelope, pulled out a letter, and read it, then reread it.

  “No, it can’t be,” she whispered. Her mind raced as she tucked the letter in her pocket and quickly finished cleaning up.

  • • •

  Ona ran her hands under the warm water of the faucet, trying to wash the dirt off. Her arms and hands were sore from working in the garden all day, and she knew it would only get worse later that night. Al Dwhin was still bringing in the day’s harvest, buckets of vegetables to be used for the week. Prolt wasn’t far behind him, pulling a small wagon of tools and supplies behind his chair. Al Dwhin grunted as he bent down to unhook the wagon with his big hand.

  “You need something for the pain?” Ona asked, wiping her hands on a nearby towel.

  “Nah, I’m okay. I just need to soak later tonight. I tell you, my muscles aren’t what they used to be.” Al Dwhin stretched his tall body and rubbed his lower back with his big hand, scratching his forehead with his little arm.

  Ona wet a washcloth with warm water and brought it over to Prolt, helping him wipe off the dirt from his hands and arms. Ona searched for places where dirt had mixed with his drool and hardened to form a crust. When he was done, she looked down at him. “Knee and hip?” she asked.

  He nodded and smiled, “Knee and hip.”

  Ona bent down and adjusted his knee, picking it up and pushing to the left. “Better? She asked. “Better. Much better,” he answered, relieved.

  “You know you should have told me when we were in the garden and I could have done it there,” she reminded him for the millionth time.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t want to make you get up from your new method. Plus, you’d get my knee all dirty with your muddy hands.” Prolt looked at her sharply with a half smile and laughed, catching some of his drool with his wrist. Ona smiled at him, shaking her head, knowing he had probably been in pain for the last hour although he had not said anything.

  “Ha ha,” she said, lightly elbowing his shoulder. He laughed.

  “So did it work out better today?” Al Dwhin called over from the sink where he was finishing up. “Less pain?”

  “A little,” Ona answered. “My legs don’t hurt anymore, but it’s too hard holding myself up with my arms all day. Maybe I could ask Wild if she could build me a kind of little bench or something? Something similar to the one she made for Rex?”

  “Mm-hmm, let’s ask her tonight at dinner. I think she could get you one by tomorrow afternoon.” Al Dwhin raised his eyebrows knowingly at Ona and Prolt. “If she’s in a good mood.”

  Ona laughed quietly and shook her head. “At that rate, I’ll be waiting forever.”

  Prolt expertly backed his chair up to the large metal wagon filled with the food and some flowers. Al Dwhin secured the full baskets and crates so they wouldn’t topple over on their ride back while Ona connected the wagon to the hitch on the back of Prolt’s chair. Once finished, she carefully maneuvered herself onto the small empty space that had been left for her on the wagon. She reached over and held the bucket of flowers on her lap as Prolt began to pull out of the shed, with Al Dwhin walking ahead to open the large doors of the biosphere.

  • • •

  Rex sat still, staring down at the letter after having read it. West watched her, patiently waiting. Rex felt like the earth beneath her feet had fallen out from under her.

  “Have you shown this to anyone else?” Rex’s rough hands carefully folded the piece of paper back along its creases, laying it on the table between them.

  “No, I came straight here. Seva was with me, but she didn’t see it. She’s still back at the receiving center. Do you think it’s real? Do you think they’re coming?”

  “It’s real. It was with an Arrival. It can’t be anything else.” Rex ran her hands over her hair and thought for a moment. “It says they sent word through the system. I wonder how long ago that was.”

  “There’s no way to tell. Holdan broke the system soon after the last one of them died. There’s no fixing it or
getting it back. He made sure of it.”

  “Damn, Holdan,” Rex sighed. “Can we get one of the Arrivals to work on it and try to fix it? Maybe they could also find out if there have been other messages sent.”

  West paused. “I can ask, but what would we tell them it is? Won’t they ask? We can’t tell them the truth.”

  “I don’t know. We can tell them whatever we have to. We just need it done. It’s our only way to find out more about this letter. If there are messages there, we need to know what they say.”

  West nodded her head and paused. “But why would they come here? And why now, after all this time? What could they want?”

  Rex lowered her eyes, shook her head, and spoke slowly, almost as if she were talking to herself. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Once the Arrivals started to come, I just assumed that was the end of it. But maybe it was just the beginning.”

  West was quiet. When she spoke next, her words were almost a whisper. “They think we’re dead—or worse. This message was clearly meant for the General. They have no idea we’re alive and the rest of them are gone. When they find out what has happened,” she leaned forward, “They will kill us.”

  “We can’t think about that now. We don’t know why they are coming, but we have to be prepared, and our only hope is to try and retrieve the messages they sent from the system. There’s got to be a way.”

  West raised her head, pulling herself out of the whirlpool of thoughts racing through her mind. Exhaling deeply, she said, “Okay. I can ask tomorrow.”

  “Good. And for now, we don’t say a word to anyone.” Rex looked at West.

  West held Rex’s gaze and nodded. Steadying herself on her cane, West rose from her chair and began to limp away. At the door, she stopped and turned her head toward Rex.

  “When we do decide to tell the rest of them, you have to be the one to tell Wild.” West paused for a moment, before leaving.

  Letting out a long breath in the dim light, Rex sighed, now alone. “I know.”

  • • •

  “In the beginning, it was supposed to be a punishment,” Rex began slowly. “It was the best solution the Perfects could come up with: send the cripples away. They couldn’t bear to look at us, but they couldn’t bring themselves to continue killing us. UnPerfects, they used to call us—U.P.s.” She trailed off, staring into the fire, not moving, breathing slowly. “I don’t know. Must’ve been something in their souls. Call it guilt, call it instinct, call it morals, but they couldn’t do it. Believe me, they tried. They killed most of us, but something didn’t sit well with them about it. I think it was the children that finally did them in. They couldn’t keep killing their own, but they couldn’t keep or raise them either. So they came up with this,” she motioned with her arm. “They sent us here to die.”

  “Wasn’t no children, it was Jay Lu,” Wild interjected gruffly from her chair. “If it wasn’t for him, we’d all be dead, like we should. Was his daddy that put a stop to it. Those men would’ve kept on shooting and injecting us and dragging us out to the Fields for the birds to finish us off if his darlin’ little baby boy hadn’t been born. I was waiting for my turn and that damned baby had to come spilling out of his mother like a goddamned alarm.”

  “Wild.” Al Dwhin’s voice was disapproving as he furrowed his brow.

  “What?” Wild challenged, looking squarely at Al Dwhin. “I was ready. We was all ready. We was all prepared and ready, goddamn it. If it hadn’t been for him, it all would have ended then and there like it should have, and we never would have ended up here in this mess about to lose everything again, everything we’ve worked so hard for. We all know it was Jay Lu and his high-powered daddy.”

  Wild paused, shaking her head and frowning. “Jean shouldn’t have been there.” She trailed off, slowly curling in on herself. The room fell silent.

  Ona turned back to Rex.

  Rex kept her eyes on the fire. She hadn’t heard Wild talk about Jean in a very long time. No one had. It was like being pulled back into another time. Suddenly, clear as day, Rex could see Jean throwing her arms around Wild, the two of them smiling and laughing, gazing at each other. She could see Jean passionately hunched over the dining room table late into the night, mapping strategies and plans with markers and pens. She could hear Jean yelling, refusing to leave the rest of the U.P.s, defiantly resisting the surrounding soldiers, and Wild looking up at her, pleading with her to go. The air had been thick with smoke and screams, as thousands of soldiers carted U.P.s away by the truckload to the camps to be burned, tortured, killed. No one knew at that time, but they were certain they weren’t coming back.

  Jean was one of the hundred or so Perfects who didn’t run. There had been thousands of Perfects there that night who had fled once the trucks showed up, but not Jean. She stayed and was taken to the camps alongside Wild and the rest of them. Beaten and raped like everyone else, she endured the camps for the three weeks they were all there. She was shot and taken out to the Fields minutes before the order came down to halt the killings.

  Wild was set to die that day as well, but it never happened. She screamed for them to kill her too, all day and into the nights that wore on as they all sat in agonizing anticipation of what was going to come next. Right up until they loaded her onto the rocket bound for Hollow, Wild tried to die.

  The orders had been swift and firm, from the head of the New Regime himself: everyone in the camps was to be shipped off to Hollow. Two hundred soldiers would accompany them. For what, no one knew.

  Rex had only ever heard of Hollow as an experiment, as a new planet they were hoping to make inhabitable. There had been talk at one point that the regime would send all the criminals there to be quarantined and die, but everyone knew the regime needed the free labor in the prisons too much to send their criminals away.

  In those days, none of the U.P.s knew what was to come. Would they be unloaded and killed there? Would they be tortured? Experimented on? Or simply left to starve and die in their own filth?

  The six of them in that room had organized together for years, heading up much of the leadership of the U.P.s before they were taken to the camps. And their bonds remained strong, as many of the other U.P.s on Hollow looked to them for answers and guidance. They had all met working to free U.P.s from violent institutions to join the mass movements that were happening, laid down strategy and plans for their communities, and provided shelter and support to more U.P.s than they could name, who were being abandoned and hunted by the Perfects. They had lost many on their team, hard blows to their spirits, but they knew they had to keep moving on. They owed it to their departed teammates and to each other to keep moving toward the world they believed was possible.

  The sound of Ona’s voice stopped Rex’s thoughts. “Who is Jay Lu?” she asked.

  West interrupted loudly. “Well, we should head to bed. It’s getting late and we have a long day tomorrow. Come on,” she urged, nudging Ona’s shoulder from above. Ona sighed and got up slowly, leveraging her weight from side to side until she was steadily on her feet.

  “You too,” West ordered the other Arrivals who had been quietly listening.

  The Arrivals offered good-nights to the room and left. West followed them to the door and closed it behind them, turning quickly on her cane.

  “What are you all doing?” she demanded. “Telling them everything? Telling them now will only make it harder when we have to leave.”

  “What are you talking about? They asked, and they deserve to know. They need to know,” Prolt responded.

  “It’s true,” Al Dwhin began. “After all, they came to us. They’re old enough to hear about it all. It’s where they came from. Plus, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We may not be here that much longer.”

  West was firm. “The letter said we had six months. That’s plenty of time to—”

  “We don’t know if that’s true,” Rex interrupted. “The Perfects can change their minds anytime and do what they please, as we�
��ve all seen. They could send more tomorrow, and we wouldn’t be able to stop them. Shit, we don’t even know where we are. We don’t have any more time. We have to move fast, and that includes getting the Arrivals ready. We need them. We’re not as young as we used to be, and we can’t do this on our own.”

  West softened and looked with defeat from Rex to Al Dwhin to Prolt. “But they are so young. I just—I … I just don’t want them to get hurt,” she said as she sank into a nearby chair, letting her cane drop to the floor.

  “They don’t know what it was like. And how do we tell them? Even if we do, there’s no way to get them to understand. How do you teach a history of hate in the name of love? How can we warn them of what kind of monsters they might have to face? How do we tell them what the camps were like? Do we tell them of it all? Jean screaming in the next cell over, Ashlin begging for his life, still alive after the injection to see the birds eating his flesh? The way they just disposed of us and piled us dead in the Fields. Like we were some kind of garbage, like human waste. Sometimes I can still hear the sound of those damn crows, and it haunts me.” West hung her head, her face buried in shadow.

  The room was heavy with silence, everyone drenched in memories of another world.

  Al Dwhin was the first to move slowly across the circle, coming to kneel next to West, dropping his tall body to the floor. “I know,” he said in a soft, knowing voice, filled with all the weight of their past. He gently moved his little arm under hers and she caressed it as she collapsed against him.

  “We have to tell them,” Prolt said, wheeling closer, lowering his voice. “We have to tell them all of it, even if it is hard. It’s the only way for us to be able to save Southing if that letter is true.”