by Anthology
“What the hell is it then?”
Now I hesitate, uncertain myself. “I don’t know.”
“You’ve never tried to get rid of it, then?”
Our discussion is moving into forbidden territory. I won’t answer such questions, no matter how many times he asks. “I’m tired, Ruhan. I need to sleep. Go join your companions.”
He doesn’t argue, because knows it won’t change anything.
***
Ruhan was an enigma, not so much in his character but in the way he made me crave his company one moment and recoil from it the next. I spent most of my life in isolation of one form or another, ever since the day I woke up and found myself alone on a rocky shore. Twenty years on the Lonecross has been nothing out of the ordinary. But Ruhan changed everything when he took an interest in me. Not as an oddity, but as a person.
Initially he was no different than the other crewmen who slipped away unnoticed to try and engage me through the speaker with snide remarks. I ignored them and I ignored him too. But then one day he told me his name.
“Everyone knows me by CR7,” he said quietly. “But my real name is Ruhan.”
I didn’t respond, but I pondered this new tack. What did he expect from me?
“Are you lonely in there?” he asked in a strained voice.
I hesitated, then spoke. “No.”
He didn’t seem surprised that I answered. I heard a small sigh in his voice, and then he said, “I’m lonely.”
Over time, Ruhan and I settled into a peculiar relationship. He talked and I listened. I rarely asked questions, but when I did, he devoured them like a hungry animal. He needed to tell his story. He shared how his older brother had been responsible for getting him hooked on phreno, a hallucinogen. He mentioned his grandmother and her effort to keep him at home, away from trouble.
“What did she look like?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked. I can’t remember my own grandparents. Perhaps I wanted an image to fill that hole.
“Ah, mi abuela, she was such a beauty, even in her old age,” he said with a smile in his voice. “She had hair black as a raven, even at seventy. Barely any gray at all. And even though she was mujercita—a little lady—and she had these eyes that would put the fear of hell into your soul with one look. She would tilt her head to one side and put her hands on her hips, and her mouth would turn into a hard, thin line. Those eyes would drill right into you. That’s when you knew you might as well give up, because there was no escaping her wrath. But she was good. So good. And she loved me. I wish I’d paid more attention to that.”
***
Before he began begging me for stories, Ruhan would often tell me about the crew. He’d share conversations, altercations, weaknesses and strengths. Later, after we’d become more familiar with each other, he’d tell me what the men said about me; wild speculations, some of them humorous.
“CN8 says you aren’t a woman. You’re a machine, or a program or an AI-bot to make us think you’re real. He says you’re spying on us.”
I smiled at that. “What would be the point?”
“That’s what I said. But it makes more sense than what CV10 says.”
“Which is?”
“You’re an alien.”
“Maybe he’s right,” I said, but I didn’t want him to know how close they were to the truth.
As years crept by, he shared more troubling experiences. Infighting became worse. Twice, a crewman attacked and killed another. One by one, their numbers dwindled, until there were only five. Their tasks took longer to complete. Eventually, repairs were neglected and chores left unfinished. Ruhan began avoiding the others as much as possible.
Once, he came to me in the night, his voice tight with pain. “You awake?” he asked, gasping.
I rose from my place at the portal and moved to the door. “What’s wrong?”
“They beat me.”
My chest tightened. “Why?”
“They found out I’ve been talking to you.”
For the first time I felt a protective rage rise up inside. I wanted to make them pay for what they’d done to him. I might have even said something to that effect, although I don’t remember.
“I…I won’t be able to visit anymore, Kata,” he whispered. “Sorry.”
And he didn’t. Not for an entire year, by my feeble calculations. It was the longest year of my impossible life.
***
Time passes for me without an identity. I struggle to recognize its markings of minutes and hours. I try to make my own but they constantly shift and change. I sleep and I wake. I shower, read, write on a small tablet provided for me. I talk to Ruhan and Ruhan talks to me. And then I sleep again.
I dream I’m in the box. It’s a steel coffin and I watch, bound and helpless, as the seams are welded shut. It’s so hot inside; I can’t breathe. I’m jostled severely, my head and shoulder slamming from one side to the other. I know what’s happening to me. I’m being transported once again on a ship, but this time it’s a barge filled with cargo containers.
I can’t stop screaming. Pounding. Kicking. There’s a violent impact and thunder. At once the temperature changes—cool, cold, freezing. The pressure builds in my head and lungs. This is the end. I won’t be miraculously released this time. But I am. Always I’m protected. Shielded. Freed.
I wake up panting for breath. This is a nightmare I’ve had more times than I can count. The worst of my tortures always revisits me in my dreams.
When I find sleep again, he comes to me. He’s a thunderstorm that takes me by surprise each time. He rolls across my dreams and covers me, a shadow over the sun, an eclipse. He knows I can’t turn away. He’s a coiled adder, a stinging hornet, a hungry panther who devours me and I let him. He’s all I have.
I hate him because he’s stolen from me every precious thing I’ve owned or ever hoped to own: a family, children, a home, friendships, companionship, dreams, ambitions, all the things that have never had a chance to come to fruition because of what this creature has done to me. I love him, because he’s been my family, my child, my home, my lover, my companion, for nine hundred years. And when he visits me in my dreams, I lash out like a cornered animal, then I yield. More—I welcome him.
Always sorrowful, Kata, he says. Why do you resist?
I’m tired.
I am stirring inside you. I am growing now.
I know.
Are you ready?
No.
A woman is given nine months to prepare for birth. I have given you nine hundred years. Is that not enough?
No. How could I ever prepare for something like this?
Ah, Kata, my river of souls, my stream of dreams. Do you love me?
You’re cruel.
No, only pragmatic.
When you’re released from my body, will you let me die?
Is that your wish?
It is, more than anything.
Do you wonder if there is something more for you?
No, because I know there isn’t.
Has it been so dreadful that you welcome death?
Nine hundred years is too long for anyone to live.
I could give you something more, something fuller, richer.
I only want release. I want peace.
Do you love me, Kata?
You’re a parasite. I’m a mere host. How can you ask that question?
You are more than a host. You are my eyes to the stars, my ears to the music of the spheres. You are my heartbeat and my food, you are my breath. Do you love me?
Yes.
Afterward, I sleep and do not dream.
***
When I awake, I’m hungry. It’s a sensation I haven’t felt in a long time. The cycle has begun again as it has hundreds of times before, but this time something is different. The life in my womb is growing and changing. It’s ready to be born, to emerge from this shell of a body, this swollen belly that has housed it and nourished it for far too long. It needs to be fed, more than what I can
give. I think of the crewmen who’ve died in the past twenty years, whose internal parts could sustain me if I had them now. Space has devoured them instead.
I shower, lingering under the hot spray a little longer than usual. Afterward as I dry off, I study my image in the reflective surface of my bedroom wall. I notice how much I’ve changed. All my body hair is gone, including my eyebrows and lashes. My eyes bulge slightly, as if too big for their sockets. Over time, he’s replaced my blood with a blue fluid, and it gives me a deathly tint, the color of a body pulled from icy waters. My skin is translucent, but also coarse and leathery. I look as though I could crumble at the slightest touch. But I’m stronger than ever. I’m impenetrable. The irony of that is not lost on me.
I don’t bother to dress. No one but the cold, impartial observer in the ceiling sees me, and the freedom of nakedness is one of the few small pleasures I can enjoy.
Ruhan comes with breakfast. “Did you sleep well, Kata?”
“No,” I reply. “I had bad dreams.”
“Tell me about them.” The speaker crackles. I’m sure after so many years it’s beginning to break down. The crewmen are nothing more than maintenance men, but they are few now, and there are priorities. Speakers are likely at the bottom of the list. I’m only grateful that Ruhan still comes to me, that he found a way to visit mostly unhindered. He’s never told me how it happened, what arrangement he made with the crew, or what threat he may have held over their heads. Ruhan doesn’t seem like a strong man, but I think he wears it as a disguise. I think—after the beating, after the long year passing—he took that disguise off and showed the crew who he really was.
The speaker hisses. I remember my loneliness without Ruhan’s conversations, and a tiny spark of panic flares in my chest at the thought of another long, empty stretch with no communication. But it passes.
“I dreamt that I was in the steel coffin, the one they put me in to try and kill me.”
“Ah, yes. A long time ago. When did you say?”
“I don’t remember exactly. I’ve tried to forget over the years. I think it was sometime in the mid-twentieth century, maybe around 1960.”
“You have that dream a lot.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t think of a worse way to die.”
I have to laugh at that.
Ruhan laughs with me, but he seems puzzled. “What’s so funny?”
“You don’t see?” I reply. “It is the way you will die. You’re in a box, sealed in, cast out into the vast ocean of space, with no control over where the ship goes or what your end will be.”
Ruhan is silent for so long I think he might have left. Then he says, “It’s not so bad, I guess. It’s different than a steel coffin. I can breathe.”
“You can breathe,” I say. “Yes, there’s that.”
He changes the subject. “CL6 won’t make it much longer. He had a stroke yesterday. That means just four of us now.”
His news means nothing to me. CL6 is a number. I’ve never seen him. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard his voice. Ruhan only mentions him in passing. But I think about his death, of the possibilities it might offer me.
“Will you do it this time?” I ask.
Ruhan knows what I want. “I can’t,” he says. “You know I can’t.”
“Just the pancreas, the liver and the thyroid glands. That’s all I ask. Is it so much from a man who will end up ejected into space? What difference will it make to a dead man?” There’s a desperate tone to my voice. I don’t want Ruhan to hear it, but I am desperate, and I need the organs. The life in me needs to be fed again.
“They’d never allow it,” he says. “They might kill me if they found out. They’re scared of you, Kata.”
“Aren’t they scared of you?”
“Not enough. Not anymore. But you…it’s different with you.”
“They have every right to be scared of me.”
I hear Ruhan’s shallow breathing. “Would you kill us and eat us if you could?” he asks.
I want to say no, but I can’t. “It’s out of my control, Ruhan. He’s like a demon possessing me. I do whatever he wants.”
Ruhan thinks about this. “My abuela believed in demons.”
“Did your grandmother believe in aliens?”
“She believed in everything,” he says, then tries to change the subject. “Have you named it? The thing in your belly.”
He doesn’t want me to push about the organs, because it frightens him. So I let I go. “I call him the wasp.”
“No shit? What kind of name is that?”
“It’s not a name. Just a label.”
I tell him another story, one I haven’t shared before. “Once, sometime around the early 1800s, I broke into a house. I’d been wandering in the wilderness for months, maybe even years. Time gets lost when you live so long. The natives there kept me fed and covered by making me offerings of animals and furs so I would stay away from their villages. They called me the River Witch. Sometimes Red Boar.
“I needed real clothes, something more than furs. I’d been watching this particular homestead—a woman lived there with her husband and three young sons. She was similar to me in size and build. So one day, when they’d gone to town, I broke in and took one of her dresses and a blanket.
“I allowed myself a moment to explore the house. It had been so long since I’d been inside one. The house was small but cozy. I noticed a small stack of books on a table—children’s books. One was about insects, with pictures carefully detailed and colored. There was a wasp with indigo wings, which I read about…it laid its eggs inside living beetle grubs.
“This was a revelation to me. For the first time I had some way to identify what had happened to me, no matter how grotesque the comparison. I hadn’t become pregnant, as I’d shamefully believed all those years. No, I was the captive host to this creature, a slave to his whims while I nourished his offspring with my body. The alien I encountered was humanoid; in fact, there was nothing about him I would define as insect. But what he did to me was very much like the wasp in that book. So I called him a wasp after that. It seemed most appropriate.”
Ruhan lets out a low whistle. “Jesus.”
There seems no good reason to hold back anything anymore. “He was stranded,” I continue. “Wounded. Abandoned. Dying. His ship would never again break the chains of Earth’s gravity. And so he waited for the time when Earth developed the technology to travel into deep space. Nine hundred years. He’s on his way home.”
Somewhere, out in the vast reaches of space, we’re drawing closer to what’s familiar to him. It’s an exchange, of sorts, between us, and also something we share. Against his will the wasp gave up his familiar home for an alien one; and now, ironically, I find myself doing the same. A slave to the will of one who could no longer direct his own fate.
Three days later, when it’s time for my meal, I find a bowl of organs, the ones I’ve asked for. I can’t eat fast enough.
***
Weeks pass before I hear from Ruhan again. When he shows up, I feel more relief than I want to. But he sounds tense, even frightened.
“How are you?” he asks, his voice shaky. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I was worried about you.”
“Worried about me? Ah, osita, how nice.” His words don’t line up with the fear I sense from him.
“You got in trouble for bringing me the organs, didn’t you?”
“Oh…yeah, some trouble,” Ruhan says. “Kept me locked up for a few days. But…you don’t want to hear about that. Talk to me, Kata. Tell me how many different ways you were tortured.”
I’m startled by his request. Does he wish to identify with me somehow, or are there darker, perverse urges at play? “I don’t understand what you’re asking,” I say finally.
He’s quiet for a long moment. “I think, sometimes, that if you went through so much, I can face it too, you know? I can handle it.”
I reluctantly rattle off a list of u
nsuccessful attempts by others—and myself—to end my life: drowning, burning, impaling, poisons, acids, bullets, explosions, radiation, lasers. And when nothing worked, confinement to small, dark rooms, exile to wastelands, separation behind impenetrable fences…then I stop. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Yeah, I guess. Are you scared, Kata? Scared of the end?”
“You mean, scared to die?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I welcome death if it comes.”
“You think it won’t? You think you’ll stay alive forever?”
I ponder his question; my answer. “I hope not.”
Ruhan releases a long breath. “They want to kill me, Kata.”
“Who?”
“CM and CJ. They’ve killed CB.”
This news alarms me. “What?”
“We’re close to a planet. Looks like it’s habitable. A lot like Earth. Either we’ll burn up in the atmosphere or crash. Who knows? But there’s only one escape pod. I figure CJ; he’s the strongest. He’ll knock off CM and me, and take the pod. He might land on the planet; he might not. But he thinks he will.”
I open my port window, which I’ve kept dark for the past few months, and see what I’ve missed: a large, bright planet fills the view. Outside, the space plankton skim gracefully past, unperturbed by our presence. But there seem to be more of them, gathering close, as if waiting. I understand the purpose of their presence now; they’ve been guiding and maneuvering the ship through space toward this point. It was never random. The minute the ship launched, it had a destination.
But it’s Ruhan’s revelation that surprises me most. “The ship has an escape pod?”
“It only fits one person. Files and logs are stored in there. It can be maneuvered and it’ll make it to the planet in one piece. That’s what CJ said. But who’s to know what the atmosphere’s like? He says it’s good…But what the hell, it doesn’t matter anyway. We’re all sentenced to death, right? Here it is, ready and waiting.”
There’s a hitch in his voice. “I don’t want to die alone, Kata.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t want him to die at all. He’s been the only human friend I’ve known in nine hundred years.