AFTERBIRTH
By Kameron Hurley
"Who is this?"
"Bakira so Dasheem, your honor."
"And what the fuck does she want?"
"She is here to speak in favor of the reinstitution of the outer space initiative, your honor."
"Her and what army?"
“She is just a woman, your honor.”
“Is she from some Family I’ve not heard of?”
“No, your honor.”
“Then why is she here? I can’t stand colonial trash.”
“You had an appointment open, your honor.”
“God is most merciful, child, but I am not, particularly when you’re clotting up my schedule with colonial martyrs. I suppose it will pass the time until prayer. Send her in.”
***
Bakira so Dasheem gave birth to her children at the breeding compounds in Jameela, a thriving green settlement in Nasheen between the mountains and the sea. She took the train there from the inland farming town of Mushirah, crossing a desert waste of toppled cities and war-torn vistas that she had only read about in old history texts. It was her first train ride, and she found it exhilarating and just a little bit terrifying. The long war with Chenja and Nasheen spared no one, and each train line she transferred to had the ring of the familiar about it, as if she had heard some news story about it getting blown up or mined or heard of some great catastrophe that came upon its travellers.
She was not pregnant then, of course. That was for the magicians and birthing specialists to conjure, but if she had been it wouldn’t have made much difference. By all counts, her children would belong to the state, unless she felt some strange need to care for them. She had put off her required birthing quota as long as possible. Her mothers had left her a plot of land in Mushirah, and for many years, she was the only person who could make anything grow there. She spent most of her nights up on the roof, gazing at the stars. She studied astronomy over the radio as part of her state school program. But when she went to Mushtallah looking for a job scouring the stars as part of the state-sanctioned outer space programs, she was turned away again and again. Only women who had fulfilled their child quota were given those jobs. If she wanted to know more about the wandering satellites that crossed over her farmland each night, she had to birth the required number of babies. It was her duty to God, and Nasheen. Her mothers once confided that they had each had two broods of six before settling on the interior and raising children belonging to others – Bakira included. When Bakira asked them why they cared for her and her house sisters instead of their birth children, both had laughed and told her they’d been far too young to care for babies.
But everyone had to do their part for the war, however far-off it sometimes seemed, or how unready they felt.
Bakira had known women who died birthing babies at the compounds. She had heard terrible stories of botched deliveries and mutant children. But it was the only way she would get to the stars. Some things, she resolved, were worth a little blood and pain.
When she arrived at the compounds, they brought her through an organic filter that ate the dust and bugs and any lingering contagion from her body. It was only the second time in her life she’d been through a filter.
“It keeps you safe,” the receptionist told her. “Only those coded for the filter are allowed entrance. Less chance of Chenjan infiltration, you know.”
They stamped her with a tattoo that gave her name and birthplace, and told her to see her first birthing specialist. It was the first of many. It turned out her womb was all wrong for carrying babies.
But they made her have them anyway.
When it all went wrong six months into her pregnancy, when she was bloated and semi-conscious, aware only of rapid movement and the swinging overhead lights and blinking, semi-organic syringes, she wondered if she would die. Wondered, only once, if the stars were worth it.
The magicians crowded over her like flies, buzzing and spitting.
“She has a bicornuate uterus. I told you she would not last full term, not with a brood this large. Who authorized this? Better to have stuffed her with a new womb.”
“We already reduced the number of embryos to –“
“And risked a woman’s life. She should never have been allowed to go past the window of viability. Poor thinking, poor planning.”
“I am sorry, Yah Reza, I did not think –“
“No, you did not think, and now it is not just one woman’s life at risk but a woman and five children. Such fools you are. You want to waste more lives, go throw yourselves on the front line, and spare me your idiocy.”
It was many years before Bakira realized that the screaming she heard then was her own.
***
“It says in your report that when Queen Ayyad revoked your program’s funding, you did not, in fact, cease your work. Is that correct?”
“That is correct,” Bakira said. “When the research sanctuary was closed I continued my research in Mushirah, at my family’s farm.”
“With what equipment?”
“I had liberated some outdated equipment from the sanctuary. I was told it would be of no further use.”
“You admit to stealing equipment from the monarchy?”
“I admit to furthering our knowledge of what lies beyond the outer atmosphere.”
“And now you’re here to tell me this knowledge was worth betraying your Queen’s explicit order and stealing much-needed resources in our struggle against the Chenjans?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Why did you do this?”
“For the betterment of Nasheen, your honor.”
“Ours is a perfect world, matron so Dasheem. All that makes it imperfect is the war, and when that is over, you will have all the time you want to seek the stars. Instead, you stole much needed resources to no purpose.”
“I told you. I had a purpose. I wanted to know what our ancestors hoped for. I wanted to believe our world could be better.”
“But you didn’t make anything better, did you? Instead, you stole resources and threw them at some dead point of light. You and that agency had your priorities backward. Do you have any response to that?”
***
It was just hours after the bloody birth, still trembling and fuzzy-headed, that Bakira stumbled out of her dormitory bed in the middle of the night, clutching at her cramping belly. She pushed onto the balcony overlooking the sea. It was full dark, and the moons were in recession, barely as big as a thumbprint in the night sky. She gazed across the thundering ocean to where the water met the starry horizon. She gripped the rail and leaned forward, sparking a fresh wave of pain that radiated through her body. The wind whipped at her hair, her long tunic. Blood trickled down her legs. And she wept.
Because it was not until that night that she realized what she was. What all of them were.
They were merely bodies. Weapons of war.
It was an inescapable revelation, and it cut her deeply, deeper than any birthing knife. She wept because she knew then that her only escape was to find some way to get to the stars, away from all this madness and pain, on some lonely planet, where they had been abandoned at the far end of the universe.
***
"Have you given birth to any children, your honor?"
"I would not sit on this council unless I had."
"If the child was diseased, ill-formed, wouldn't looking to the past, to the mother's conditions under which the child was formed at birth, wouldn't that give us some answer to how to move forward to create better children, healthier children?
"Are you implying that Umayma is ill-formed?"
"I am implying that Umayma could be a better place. There is no sin in saying we could be better people. This cannot be the world t
hey imagined for us. I have proof that it is not."
"Not one of us on the high council will sanction the stealing of vital public resources for private purposes."
"You think the war is not a private enterprise? I would take weapons from the hands of the war machine that profits First Families like yours and the families of those corrupt Chenjan mullahs, and use it to uncover the secrets of our past, and all the technology lost to us. We could cure more ills. Save more children. Surely our predecessors did not die of cancers. Or Azam fever. Or a hundred other things. I've heard it said they lived a thousand years or more. Yet our women struggle to reach fifty - "
"Not all struggle."
"You don’t, no. No, the First Families do not struggle. In a world of nearly twenty million, there are perhaps five hundred who do not suffer as the rest. You make us suffer so you don’t have to. But I speak of a future where none suffer. We can build that future. But only if we believe in it."
"Your concerns have been noted," the councilwoman said. “Are you quite finished, or did you have actual evidence to share at this hearing?”
“I have evidence, your honor.”
***
The state made it remarkably easy to leave her children.
"You want them to have your first name for their last, or keep your family name?" the recorder asked. “Or we can just randomly assign them some common names, if you like.”
It was three days after the birth, and Bakira’s wound was already scarred over. They said she could come back and have it cut out of she liked, but most women liked to keep it, to prove they had done their part for the future of Nasheen. Bakira was alone now, with her mothers both gone to cancer, her house sisters dead at the front, and her lovers Ghaliyah and Farah long since lost to her. Easy enough to do her duty to Nasheen, have her little babies, and leave them here to be raised. What did she know about raising babies? She had been brought up in a state school for three years before she got her first house mother. And it was three more after that before she was permanently assigned to a household where she felt comfortable calling her parents "mother." Even then, she knew she was not a wanted child, just a necessary one for helping around the farm. It was a cold existence.
"I'd like them to keep the second name," Bakira said. “It’s an old name. My mothers said it’s from the beginning of the world.”
The recorder shrugged. "Fine. Boys?"
The only boys she’d known had been in stories, and in the stories of heroes she read, she only remembered a few names. So the youngest she called Ghazi, after Ghazi Karif, and Fouad the King, and Amir the famous politician.
The recorder simply wrote them down, as if it didn’t matter which boy got which name. Bakira supposed it didn’t really. They do not belong to you, she reminded herself.
"And the girls?"
There were thousands of Ghazis, Amirs, and Fouads. But her girls had to be singular.
"Used to be everyone wanted a girl called Fatima or Kadijja,” the recorder muttered. “Now it’s all Danjiasa and Fahdajah. What kind of a name is that, I ask you?"
Bakira told her the names. The recorder sighed, and wrote Kinedaja so Dasheem and Nyxnissa so Dasheem.
The recorder pressed a custom tattoo onto each child’s foot, then passed over a piece of organic paper. “That’s it, then. Press your thumb there to turn them over to the state.”
Bakira’s hand hovered over the page. “Can I keep the right to retrieve them in three years? When they’ve finished with the inoculations?”
“Makes no difference to me.” The recorder gave her a different paper. Bakira studied it carefully, then pressed her thumb to the page.
The recorder peeled away a copy from the page and gave it to her. “Nobody does, you know.”
“What?”
“Come back,” the recorder said, and gave her a thin smile. “You all say you will, but nobody does.”
Bakira turned away from the desk and began walking down the hallway. She still ached, but the magicians had already stopped her body’s production of milk, and scrubbed her clean of many of the surging hormones that had made her so mad and exhausted in the months of her pregnancy. She would still expel bugs in her stool for weeks to come, they said, but it would reduce her chances of depression and encourage her body’s healing.
When she stepped into the blinding light of the afternoon, she could almost pretend that the last year of blood, pain, and confinement had been some kind of dream, a waking nightmare soon forgotten in the warm afternoon.
By evening, she had a state-sponsored ticket to Hayat, and a position waiting for her at the Mount Hayat Astronomical Research Sanctuary. When she looked up at the night sky from the train, she could almost pretend she had never had any children at all.
***
“And what is that evidence?
“It’s what our ancestors left behind.” Bakira pointed up, to the dome that enclosed the high council chambers.
The councilwoman shook her head. “That stuff up there is just a bit of waste, effluvia. Nothing at all of importance. What is the purpose of looking behind us? It's like asking a woman to keep her placenta in a jar and examine it all day, scrying for some hint it would give to the person her child will become. That it sorcery and witchcraft at best.”
“You’re mistaken. Pretending a thing did not happen does not make it so. Pretending that when we look up into the sky, we’re all alone, does not make the rest of the universe disappear.”
The councilwoman leaned toward her, squinted. “I think too many of you astronomers are high on sen, is what I think.”
***
When they finally allowed Bakira access to the powerful telescopes, it was merely to verify the findings of others. They spent much of their time at the sanctuary mapping the moons, gaining knowledge of how their ancestors had lived on those giant bodies. All that was visible there now were the entrances to sub-surface cities, some roads, and tantalizing glimpses of what may have been old vehicles – a metallic fin here, an eroded organic bit of mesh there.
It was some time before Bakira asked why it was they did not look at Umayma’s smaller satellites – the wandering derelict ships that orbited the planet. On occasion, a ship would fall out of orbit and light up spectacularly in the sky, raining down over the world like a broken meteor.
“There are other agencies that study the ships,” they told her. “Defense, mostly.”
“Are they a risk?” Bakira asked. “The ships?”
“Sometimes,” was the ever-enigmatic response.
It was nearly a year before she got up the courage to go to one of the senior directors after midnight prayer and ask about the practical application of their work.
“Are we planning missions to the moons?” Bakira asked.
The director knit her brows, frowned. “Why would we do that?”
“To learn more about what happened there.”
“Of course not. It’s entirely possible there was some terrible contagion that forced them to colonize Umayma before they were ready. We could bring it back and murder every last person. It is not worth the risk.”
“Couldn’t we send a bug? We could work with the magicians, maybe, create a space-faring bug –“
“Are you mad?”
“I… No, I don’t think so.” Bakira hurriedly pulled out some calculations she had done on discarded bits of organic paper retrieved from refuse dumps throughout the facility. Spread them across the desk.
The director recoiled, but Bakira pushed on. “Our problem with flight has always been that the atmosphere here eats most ships with non-organic parts, right? The more complex, the faster it disintegrates. The reason so many derelicts survived at all is because they were partially organic. It’s why most other ships can never come here – they’re all non-organic. The world eats them. Right? But here,” she pointed to some notes from the organic tech division on the inherent properties of extinct species, namely fossilized puffer mantids. “Many of the early bugs here,
the giant ones, are said to be impervious to the vacuum. Couldn’t we create a magician-controlled bug with an outer shell like this that also had recording capabilities, like our security bugs?”
The director hesitantly reached for the pages. “Have you shown this to anyone?”
“No, but I’ve spoken to some magicians and organic technicians, and they say it should be possible.”
“Child, just because something is possible doesn’t mean it needs to be attempted.”
“I don’t understand. Isn’t this what we want, eventually? To get back to the stars? Isn’t that the ultimate aim of the outer space initiative?
The director gathered up Bakira’s notes. She shook her head. “You’re new. I will tell you this once. You are here to complete the tasks you are assigned by Queen Ayyad. That is all. The mission of this agency is not to go into outer space. The stars and the moons were abandoned by our ancestors for a reason. You may not like this world, Bakira so Dasheem, but it is yours, and there is no escaping it.”
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