by Paul Jessup
It wasn’t the nudity that kept him coming to this magazine at each port. It was a specific girl. The nets had no info on her, none that he could find. But there she was, a ghost of space. A haunting female form that burned itself into the landscape of his mind.
His first glimpse of her had been a stark and beautiful memory that haunted his dreaming hours. She had been a background figure in revealing white robes, shaved legs dangling beneath, her hips and waist barely covered. Her red hair contrasted her pale face like scarlet blades to either side of a white cloth; her mouth formed a thick-lipped, mischievous smile. There was something in her eyes that pulled him in. A restless yearning. A desire for something greater. Even though she had four pages of revealing nudity, her eyes and her lips and her face were what brought him back, made him search her out. She was not just another model. Her presence was more jovial, more jocular, more searching and burning.
“Hey cowboy, find any good cattle?”
Startled, Hodei looked up and saw Mari staring at him. Her one good eye was an intense beam of light; her jeweled eye offered him no solace from her angry gaze.
“Cattle? Cute, Mari. Cute. Not sure if she’s in this one. I haven’t seen her in the last two issues. I hope she’s all right. What’s gotten into you?”
Mari walked over to the coffee maker and flipped a cracked switch. The machine whirred to life, grinding beans into a fine powder and boiling water with a draconian hiss. “It’s your idiot brother, is all.”
Hodei raised an eyebrow. He sat up, concerned. “Trouble in paradise? Knew you two wouldn’t work out. He’s too stupid for you. I told you that a long time ago. Sugoi, he’s different in a bad kinda way, you know? He didn’t even go to school. He flunked out before anything stuck, and now his brain is like antimatter, destroying any knowledge that tries to approach it.”
He gently closed the magazine, then slid it into the drawer behind him, making sure not to crease or bend the delicate pages. Later, he would get a small plastic bag and gently slide the magazine in, labeling the outside and storing it in deep freeze with the others. His library. His most precious possessions.
“Not like me,” he said almost casually, “I mean, I don’t show it, but I’m pretty smart.”
Mari coughed, trying to hold back a laugh. Hodei looked at the ground, covering up his embarrassment. “Hey, that’s not nice. I may not be a brute, but I got my own benefits, you know.”
Mari sighed when she realized he was serious. “I don’t even know why I come to you to talk. Look, just because we’re having problems doesn’t mean I’m going to leave him for you. I love your brother, even his flaws. We’ve been together for four years. One little mistake isn’t going to change that.”
Hodei looked up, his face red and his expression a mix of anger and sorrow. “All right then. So what is it? What did my big brother do that was so damned horrible?”
“It’s not. I mean it is. Well, damnit. He’s just distant as of late, you know? And he keeps looking at that new girl. Fuck. It’s like I don’t even exist sometimes. He’ll just stare at her, and all of a sudden I’m not there anymore. I’m just a transparent thing. And I don’t like that. You know?”
Hodei grinned. “She is hot, all right.”
Mari walked over and punched him in the arm, leaving a small bruise beneath his jumper. “Aw, fuck, why’d you go and hit me for? It’s not my fault that some pretty new thing turns his head.”
“You’re no help, you know that?”
Hodei shrugged. “More than the captain. She would just give you some bullshit line, spoken through one of those dolls. About ethics in space. About no sex on the egia. That sort of thing. Me, well, at least I’m still flesh and blood, you know? The machine and void haven’t eaten me away just yet. I still got sex on the mind, and I can relate.”
He sighed and leaned back. “Besides. What do you want me to do or say anyway?”
She sat down on the chair. The hissing stopped and the smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the air as the room once again fell silent. She reached over and grabbed her own bulb of coffee, her hands almost burning from the heat. Her features were slack, emotionless. “I don’t know, Hodei. I don’t know. Maybe ... maybe you can talk to him. Ask him what he feels, you know? Get him to tell you the situation.”
Hodei laughed, hard and loud like a seal. His voice echoed in the chamber; his laughter bounced off the ribs and absorbed into the orange padding. “Oh man, you want me to go up to my brother and ask him about his love life? To get him to what? Open up to me? That’s rich! What the hell do you think I am? Huh? I’m his baby brother. If I say shit like that, he’ll beat the fuck out of me and you know it.”
Mari frowned. The metal side of her face stayed emotionless, the butterflies in flight calming down, resting on the silver cage, no longer refracting rainbows of light. “You’re right. But it’s my only hope. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
Hodei beat his fist into his hand. “Punch him. He won’t hit you back—you’re his girl. And if he even thinks about it, he knows that the captain will be watching and he’ll be shoved out into the void if he lays a hand on you. If he asks you why you hit him, you tell him you’ll do it again, at random points during the day. That way he’ll have to watch you, just so he can see when it’s coming. He will have to pay attention to you then.”
Mari sipped her coffee, looking at Hodei over the ceramic lips of the bulb. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that? Just see if you can talk to him. I don’t care if he hits you for it. If you don’t, I’ll hit you. And what would the great space bachelor Hodei do if at every port they knew he got beat up by some half-metal woman?”
Hodei stared at the padded walls in silence for a moment. He then stood up, looking at the ground. His face tried to betray emotions—so many complex emotions—but he held them in, keeping them behind a twisted map of his face. He threw his bulb against the wall. Coffee sprayed across the floor, the bulb bounced against the padding and then dropped to the floor—clink clink clink.
He stormed out, not saying a word. Mari smiled and knew that she would be getting her information soon enough.
7
Hodei paced in the engine room, knotted metal and brass wires brushing against his jumper, soft firefly sparks pulsating as they jerked and hovered in the air. In the center of the room sat giant, wet eggs, quivering and green and covered in sparkling electric webbing and film. In the center of the eggs nested the entanglement engine.
The engine resembled a human skull, bigger than Hodei, bigger than even Sugoi. It was yellowed with age, cracks lining different pieces, glued back together by the competent hands of the mozorro. It took up the width of the hallway, the eye sockets lined with translucent fungal wires.
Behind him, Hodei heard the door slide open with a loud clang, and then footsteps. Sugoi, he thought. Just on time. Acting like he had nothing planned, Hodei leaned in to get a closer look at the entanglement engine. He heard whispers in the skull, strange psychotic words that crossed over each other, a hundred voices, each of them mad. Conversations of ghosts. Each of them centuries gone, each of them trapped inside the engine, powering it.
A stone hand on his shoulder. The fingers bit into his bone. “Hey. You. What you say? Huh? You say mean?”
Hodei didn’t turn around. “What are you talking about?”
Sugoi moaned. “What? What. I tell. Mari, she mad for something. Dunno what. Last I saw, you talk her. Then I get you note. Come to ungun room. So, I come. What? What you say her? What you do her? Huh? You tell. I listen. Now.”
Hodei sighed. He heard the song of dead worlds, sung in the voices of ghost children. He heard stories of century-long wars fought in the void of space, with junk graves floating like asteroid belts around a wounded sun. “Look, dumbass, she was making fun of me for my porn.”
Laughter. The hand loosened, then patted him hard on the back. Hodei realized it was okay to turn around. His brother no longer saw him as a threat. The last time he
had been seen as a threat, he spent a week in bed, the thalna combing over his body with their little hands, stitching him slowly back to life.
Sugoi was twice Hodei’s height, with a head that scraped on the ribs of the ceiling, his eyes black stones in his skull. A giant, Hodei thought. My brother is a giant carved out of stone.
“You stop reading that stuff. No thing for real girl. And we got new one now. You like, eh?”
Hodei smiled. He could use this conversation after all. “Yeah, she is hot. What do you think, you think I got a chance?”
Sugoi shrugged. If he had been a mountain, the sky would have been filled with moving stone. “Not your type, brotherbaby.”
Hodei felt his tools along his belt. He would need something in case Sugoi got mad. He wasn’t going in unarmed again. The screwdriver should do in a pinch. The wrong word, the wrong phrase, and his brother would erupt into violence. “I’m not? Well, whose type is she?”
Sugoi leaned his arms on his knees, just so he was eye level with his little brother. The giant smelled of dirt. Of trees and moss. The stone lips opened and spoke, his words the sealing of a grave. “She my type.”
Hodei leaned back and wrapped his fingers around the handle of the screwdriver. “I thought, well, I thought Mari was your type.”
Sugoi laughed. “She is. They both my type. But you can have other girl. Just want seconds, you know? I even help. Good for both, you know? We share when you get.”
Hodei forced a laugh. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever you say, big brother.”
8
The mozorro cleaned. They climbed the halls of the egia, their nimble hands and legs digging into the giant bone architecture, latching onto ceiling, wall, and floor with mechanical agility. Their clay skin glittered with a microscopic intelligent dust, reading radio waves from Itsasu’s cage in the heart of the ship, recording their movements and sending them back to her for approval.
Their lizard-bone skulls swerved around with ratcheting sounds, pastel lenses deep in their eye sockets looking at each object they touched, inspecting it for flaws or anything that could be collected into a databank and marked with metatags.
They read back data as they scrubbed and fixed and cleaned, a constant stream of information, a societal memory that flowed with the ticking of the seconds. Notes and tags and images danced about, creating new formations, new layers within each mozorro as they hunted through the ship. The data danced into probabilities, the probabilities became predictions, and the mozorro prepared for, and awaited each catastrophe with an all-seeing prescience, using all of their abilities to keep the egia running and its crew alive.
9
Itsasu watched with mozorro eyes as Mari walked into the engine room. Itsasu’s crippled body swam around in her fluid, her frail form tensing. Her lips twisted back into a grin, a struggle for her skin and bones.
She watched as Mari walked over to one of the low-burning ion drives and ran her hand over the twisted, sparkling cages. The metal half of her face flashed dimly as she smiled and ran her fingers close to the firefly lights. Around the engine skull crawled several mozorro, scrubbing and cleaning and fixing to perfection.
Another mozorro crawled across the ceiling, focusing on a brown body walking into the engine room. The dusty suit of Sugoi, his face twitching, his hair mussed up on his head. Itsasu swam closer, her eye as close to the holo as possible. She clenched her bony fists to her sides and felt the fragile skin breaking with each movement, her blood a red dust in the fluid.
“The ungun room popular. For me. Why we meet here? Not in rooms? Like normals?”
Mari turned. Itsasu noticed the way Mari hid her face, trying to put the metal side in shadows as much as possible. “I need to talk to you. About the new girl. Why is she still here? We should’ve just sent her out in the pod or something.”
Sugoi shrugged. His eyes glanced at the whirring metal cages and the turning wire cords, his face struggling to hide a smirk at the mention of the new girl. “Dunno. You know captain. She got plans, sure. Hodei likes Ekhi enough.”
Mari walked forward, still hidden by the shadows. The only hint of her metallic face was the whirring of butterflies reflecting firefly lights. “Your brother likes anything with legs.”
Sugoi paused, staring at her. His eyes glared at the shadows, trying to see the metallic half of her face. “He not like you.”
She smiled, her good eye darting over his massive body. His whole form was retracted inward and tensed to snapping. Her red jewel reflected engine light in the darkness, a sparkling black amongst the shadows. “Never stopped him from hitting on me before.”
Sugoi’s eyes glinted, emotion breaking through the stone façade, a visage of slow pain. Anger and heat rose up inside his eyes, until they closed into slits of frustration. “I will break. Break bones. Break all. He lie. Lie to me.”
Mari stepped back. Such violence about ready to spring from the massive body.
“Trust him. He didn’t hit on me recently. I was talking about before.”
Sugoi chuckled. “Yeah. Still.”
Itsasu licked her lips, her eyes narrowing as she glanced over the holos, her eyes tracing his muscles. She zoomed in on Sugoi’s face, looking at each muscle in his jaw as he spoke. The flexing of the skin, the raw stubble across his cheek. Itsasu felt warm again, excited again.
Itsasu watched a smooth hand touch that cheek. One stained with grease. Mari’s hand? Manicured. Mari’s voice entered Itsasu’s gelatin prison. “Sugoi. Listen to me. The captain’s mission is important to us all, right?”
A pause. Heavy breathing. The hand moved off the cheek. The cheekbones were smooth. Itsasu could see every pore and blemish on that wonderful young flesh. “Yeah.”
“I mean, you still believe in our fearless leader, right?”
A shrug. Barely perceptible from this close. Itsasu saw muscles tensing, relaxing. She felt her own body tense, her whole frail form tighten. Her legs and groin tingled with a fluttering sensation. She resisted the urge to flail her twig limbs, resisted the need to unwrap her claw hands and try to reach down once again.
“Sure, I do.”
Each word was a muscle clenching, releasing, clenching, releasing.
“I do too. But I have this feeling that, well, that this new passenger is going to change things. Maybe even derail the mission. And where would that leave us? Us and all those years we spent on this ship, searching for—”
A pause.
“Don’t say, Mari. If you right, then we quiet. Not speak.”
Strands of braided hair moved over the camera. Gun-grey hair. Itsasu cursed and switched to a different mozorro. She saw the flesh of a bare back, curved hips and a straight spine. The metal face was no longer hidden by shadows, but instead stood vulnerable in the engine light, the butterflies beneath her skull cage dancing about in frenzied intensity. When had Mari dropped her clothes? “You’re right. Let’s do this quick, before your brother comes looking for us.”
Her back muscles flexed as Sugoi unzipped his dirty jumper and let it pool on the floor in a dusty heap. Several mozorro scurried up and cleaned around his clothes, making sure not to disturb the loose pile of fabric.
Mari walked over to Sugoi, leaned in and kissed him across his chest, pushing him to the floor as his hands tangled in her grey hair. The sound of the engine became a thundering rush of sounds as Mari straddled him, her hands on his chest as her back muscles tensed, released and tensed again.
Itsasu could not restrain herself anymore. She flailed her limbs, her arms down. She heard the snapping of her arm breaking and cursed as the pleasure fluids entered her prison once again.
She groaned in frustration and pleasure. It wasn’t the same, not without the physical contact. Even masturbation was something. This—this chemical love was unsatisfying. She flailed and moaned and came in conjunction with Mari and Sugoi, three rigid bodies releasing themselves in the floating graveyard of space.
10
Ekhi flailed against the
walls, a mad ghost wailing in the honeycombed halls. Her mouth frantically formed shapes, her lips twisted and grimaced with each howling scream. She clawed at her shirt, her skin, clawed as if something was living beneath her skin and she had to dig it out. She had ripped and torn her face; her fingernails were still clogged with tiny bits of flesh and blood.
Down the hall, Mari ran toward the screams with Sugoi behind her; they were both red-faced and sweating, their minds buzzing with after-sex endorphins. They followed the panicked mozorro that scrambled and clung to the walls, not ready to see the broken figure of Ekhi in a complete and total psychotic break.
At the other end of the hallway ran Hodei, his eyes large and panicked, his hands pumping to either side. He did not make any sound as he ran, his footsteps swallowed by her screams.
Ekhi was trapped. The walls rushed in, the bodies rushed in. She tried to form words in her screams, tried to turn her cries into an expression of her dread and emptiness so the others could understand her pain, so the walls would feel empathy and not smother her underneath their honey limbs.
Mari reached her first, holding her, putting the screaming head against the smooth skin of her chest. Ekhi heard Mari’s heart beating like a clock planted between rib bones. Mari’s eyes closed as she said incantations under her breath, trying, by her will alone, to make all of this stop, make Ekhi become normal once again. In response, Ekhi sobbed and rubbed her head up against Mari’s shoulder, her tears mixing with the sweat of sex.
“He’s dead!” Ekhi screamed, her voice muffled by breasts and shirt.
Hodei crouched down, putting a hand on Mari’s shoulder, his fingers resting against bare skin, the metal cage of her cheek brushing against his knuckles. A spark of connection; a sadness flowed through the three of them like an open circuit. They saw the nova, felt the rising force of orgasms, and shivered intimately. The death of a star. The birth of a galaxy.
Sugoi shot his brother a warning glance, a threatening stare. Hodei shrugged, but did not move his hand. Ekhi screamed. “He went nova, nova, nova. He took out so many planets and neighboring stars. But not me. Not me. Why am I still alive? Why am I still here? I want to be dead! Why can’t I be dead? Why am I left behind?”