No Life But This
Authors: Anna Sheehan
This one has to be for Tom, who kept telling me he missed the madness.
Anna Sheehan
Table of Contents
I have no life but this
To lead it here
Nor any death but lest
Dispelled from there
Nor tie to earths to come
Nor action new
Except through this extent;
The realm of you.
E
MILY
D
ICKINSON
When I was five years old I saw the planet of my origin for the first time.
Well, not a planet, really. Europa. Just a little chick of a moon, shadowing her hen, the great Jupiter itself. One of four tiny, helpless specks of light, circling round and round that swirling red-striped giant, so far away from this Earth upon which I had been born.
I remember squinting into the telescope
as our kindergarten tutor told us old myths about gods and nymphs and bulls, but I wasn’t really listening. I reached out with my tiny hand, already tinged with blue, as if I could grasp that tiny mote of light in my fingers, cradle it in my palm, listen to it sing. I thought it would hum in my mind, like electric equipment can. She was Europa, and I knew she was my mother. A cold and distant mother,
heartless and unreachable, but my own. She had created life – strange, alien life, consisting of heat-fed algae and delicately boned fish and curious electro microbes like the ones used to create us. Even then, I knew that Earth was not my home. So I tried to reach out an impossible distance to a moon so far removed I couldn’t even see it with my own eyes.
It was a gesture that did nothing more
profound than knock the telescope, shocking Europa out of my view. I cried at the loss of her. The tutor recaptured Europa in the viewscope, and warned me not to reach for her again.
I never listened.
I woke with a bit of a headache that morning, but I dismissed it. I’ve always been prone to them. Having a genetically modified brain hypersensitive to electrical impulses did not make for an easy life in a technological world.
Around eleven o’clock my friend Rose’s limoskiff arrived at the dorms. My roommate Jamal and I piled in quickly, thus managing to avoid the battle between my
siblings Penny and Quin, as they fought over window seats. Eventually Quin won – as he always did. For all the argument was heated and forceful, it was silent and expressionless. Europa Project children were strange that way. Quin was the only one of us who could even talk – our vocal cords under developed and our soft palate still the same shape as an infant child. Also our faces naturally showed
little to no expression. No one was certain if this was a genetic difference – akin to the neutral affect of some schizophrenics – or if it was simply a natural result of growing up apart from normal society in a laboratory. It didn’t matter. What expression we did have was subtle. Most people said they couldn’t read our expressions at all. I could. Of course, I’d grown up with it.
At her loss,
Penny slumped glumly in next to me as my sister Tristan and her roommate Molly climbed in.
I envied Tristan her roommate. Molly was from the mining colony on Callisto, another of Jupiter’s colonized moons. Callisto had lost much of its economic viability during the colonial isolation of the Dark Times, so Molly had only managed to make it to UniPrep on a scholarship, just like the four of us
EP kids. She studied hard to keep her grades up. By contrast stood my own roommate Jamal, whose family owned nearly a third of Europa. He had always been a bit of a spoiled princeling, and felt entitled to goof off continually. It was often hard to sleep with him in the same room, what with the girls he snuck in and the bizarre substances he managed to imbibe and the music he played at all hours.
Even so, I was grateful to him. He was the only boarder in the entire school who had agreed to board with
me
. There was a lot of prejudice against us, ever since we were kids. Even the nurses who had cared for us as infants called us the ‘Creepies’. It wasn’t meant maliciously, but we heard it, and we knew.
The two other boarders who would have been members of our party were gone for the summer.
Wilhelm had gone home to his parents in Germany, and Anastasia, who had come from New Russia on Titan, was spending the summer with her relatives in ‘Old’ Russia. The limoskiff twisted over on its cushion of magnetized air and left UniPrep’s dorms for Unicorn Estates.
Penny looked purple, her blue skin flushed with renewed excitement at the thought of the upcoming party. My siblings and I all
had blue skin, the reasons for which are complicated. Penny – her legal name was Pen Ultima, as her embryonic number had been 99 – was paler than most of us, and looked almost lavender when she blushed.
Penny was wildly excited. ‘
I’ve never been to Unicorn Estates before!’
she signed at me.
‘Does it really have a ballroom? And a stables? Are there horses?’
‘Calm down,’
I signed at her.
‘You’ll
see soon enough.’
Penny bounced up and down, unable to conceal her excitement. Whatever the genetic remodification had done to Penny’s brain, she was emotionally much younger than she seemed. This wasn’t strange for us. Many of us hadn’t taken the genetic remodification well, and more than half of those who had survived gestation were severely cognitively disabled. Penny was actually one of
the lucky ones. She wasn’t damaged intellectually – as her math scores could attest – but when it came to her actions she seemed more eleven than seventeen. We all sort of babied her, which probably didn’t help.
My brother Quin, as per usual, stared moodily out of the window. ‘Hey, there,’ Jamal said, kicking him in the shoe. ‘Why so blue?’
Quin gave him a withering look. ‘Aren’t you sick of
that joke by now?’
‘Hey, stick with the classics.’
‘If you have something to say to me, please raise your hand,’ Quin said. ‘Then place it over your mouth.’ Quin was the only one of us left who was able to speak. Most people were of the opinion that it would have been better if he wasn’t. He was often witty and cruel, and rarely said anything kind. He also did everything he could to make it
seem like he hated absolutely everyone, and that included Jamal. I’d never bothered to find out why. That was just Quin.
I touched Jamal’s wrist.
‘Don’t worry about Quin
,’ I told him silently.
‘He’s always like this.
’
‘I know
,’ Jamal thought back at me.
‘I’m trying to make him laugh
.’
‘Quin only laughs when someone is hurting somehow.’
Jamal thought about this, and then kicked me firmly in
the shin. I squawked with pain and fell over onto Penny, who hadn’t been able to follow our silent, telepathic exchange.
‘What was that for?’
I signed.
‘You said Quin only laughs when someone is hurting.’
As if to prove my point, Quin started to laugh. ‘There you have it, brother,’ he said. ‘Don’t make judgements.’
‘Or state truths!’
I signed.
‘Boys,’ Molly said with disgust. She looked over
at Quin. ‘Isn’t Nabiki coming?’
Quin shrugged. ‘Ask Otto. She’s his bird.’
I glared at him.
‘Couldn’t we leave Nabiki out of this?’
‘I thought you broke up,’ Molly said.
‘We did!’
I signed.
‘Four months ago,’ Jamal reminded her.
I sat back against the seat in Rose’s limoskiff, fervently wishing that this conversation hadn’t turned to myself and Nabiki. Mainly because it still hurt. I hadn’t
really wanted to break up with Nabiki, but I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t even her doing. After all, I was desperately in love with someone else.
That someone else was the person whose birthday we were heading to right now. I didn’t want to be in love with Rose. I couldn’t help it. From the first moment I’d touched her, Rose had captured me. It wasn’t merely that she was beautiful. Nothing so
simple. It was her mind that held me in thrall. Rose was different. Like me. She was fully human, but she was loving, accepting, kindly and wildly talented. She was also a hundred years old.
Rose had been regularly locked in stasis by her parents, which retarded her growth, eventually culminating in a sixty-some-year sleep from which she had been awakened only six months previous. Those six months
had been some of the worst of my life – and that was saying something. Since the first moment I touched Rose I suffered nightmares, long nights of tormented longing, and bouts of enraged self-loathing punctuated by moments of uncontrollable glee. I’d lost my girlfriend, alienated myself from my friend Bren, annoyed my siblings, disturbed my roommate, and probably tortured my therapist. I was
even being haunted by ghosts of my own past. And all because I’d fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Not only that, but Rose’s subconscious was abnormally strong, due to a hundred years of dreaming. She kept picking things up from my mind – stray emotions and half-finished thoughts. I was terrified from the moment I touched her. Terrified and overjoyed and utterly
overwhelmed. The day I met her I scheduled a special session with my therapist and mentally screamed at Dr Bija for an hour about how unfair everything was. I felt as if my life had been snatched by one of Rose’s briars, and this sudden, overwhelming devotion was choking the life out of me. Eventually Dr Bija had managed to bring me back to centre, but it had been a tough session. Dr Mina Bija was,
in my opinion, the greatest psychologist the world had ever known. She had been my saving grace for more than three years, helping me to sort out both my mind and my life, both of which were exceedingly complicated.
When we arrived at Unicorn Estates we were greeted by no less than an actual liveried footman. Unicorn Estates might have technically been a condominium, but for all it was separated
into apartments and suites, it was the most affluent and exclusive living space in the whole of ComUnity – which was the most affluent and exclusive controlled community on the planet. As we filed out of Rose’s limoskiff, another skiff slowly parked itself alongside. I knew this skiff. Sporty, bright yellow, tinted windows. Nabiki.
Nabiki lived with her parents in ComUnity, unlike us pitiful
boarding students. After Rose and Bren, who both lived here at Unicorn, Nabiki was probably the wealthiest of us. Nabiki had changed a lot in the last four months. She had allowed her immaculately coiffed hair to grow out, and she’d added chameleon highlights, that changed depending on her outfit or the surroundings. Right now they were a piercing pink, echoing the shiny neon flight jacket she was
wearing. She’d taken up some kind of high-risk air sport, sky-diving or atmosphere skimming or something. I wasn’t sure what. She didn’t talk to me much anymore.
She tossed back her highlit hair and ran up to hug Molly and Tristan. She gladly transferred her hug to Penny when Penny came bouncing up to her. Nabiki had become good friends with my sisters in the time we were together, and I was
glad that relationship hadn’t changed when we broke up.
She didn’t look at me.
The footman bowed to us professionally and directed us behind the main mansion to the pool. Rose had decided on a pool party for her seventeenth birthday, mostly, I think, because she wanted to show off her new swimsuit, and her new body with it. The first few months after she’d come out of stasis, Rose’s body was
emaciated and frail, pale and sickly and skeletal. After last spring and through the summer she’d exercised and filled out quite a bit, and she was proud of her new, healthier form. She was still underweight, still had a long way to go, but she looked great. Her body had become something that made me drop a few IQ points the moment I turned the corner to the pool patio.
Rose’s long gleaming golden
hair captured the sunlight, set off by her pale white skin, shining with sunblock. Her swimsuit was a dusky red, almost exactly the same colour as her full lips. She wore a sarong around her hips with a green and red rose garden pattern. Rose wore no makeup, and didn’t need it. Her skin was so translucent that her eyes were shadowed naturally by the veins in her eyelids, her cheeks rosy and
her lips red with her own blood.
Rose looked up from the buffet and grinned when she saw us, her white teeth bright against her red mouth. I tried not to drool. It was pointless, anyway. There were far too many complications between us.
One of the larger complications was already on the patio helping to set out towels. Rose had fallen quite neatly in love with my friend Bren shortly after she’d
come out of stasis. Considering he was the prince charming who had awakened her – and he was a gorgeous glimmering mahogany tennis athlete, who did not look unnaturally blue in the least – it wasn’t very surprising. The other complication happened to be striding in through the other gate at that moment, leading Bren’s sisters, Kayin and Hilary.
This was Xavier – Rose’s old boyfriend from before
she was stassed. Though he went by his middle name of Ron, she’d always called him by his first name. I’d taken to thinking of him by it as well, since I spent so much time with her. This man, for all intents and purposes an inter-planetary king, was now the president of UniCorp, Rose’s guardian, and the love of her life. The fact that he was now in his seventies and their relationship could no
longer be romantic meant very little when it came to Rose’s emotional state. As of right now, she found it too hard to even think about being with anyone else. Which meant my pitiful infatuation had to be put on standby, most likely forever. So I kept my feelings secret, or tried to. Sometimes I thought she might have guessed, and then other times I was sure she was completely oblivious. I’d tried
to bring the subject up a dozen times, but all I got from her mind in that direction was pain, and when I tried to talk about it with her over the net, she always changed the subject. I let her. It didn’t keep us from flirting, though.
‘They’re here!’ Bren’s youngest sister Kayin jumped forward and grabbed Penny’s hands. They had become fast friends in the last few months after Penny had been
released from the laboratory.
‘Hello, everyone,’ Rose said formally. She caught sight of Nabiki. ‘I’m so glad you made it!’
‘Yes,’ Nabiki said, striding forward to give Rose a birthday hug. I sighed wistfully. Rose was desperate to ensure that she and Nabiki stayed on good terms. Fortunately, Nabiki seemed determined not to blame Rose for my infatuation, even though part of her, I knew, really
hated Rose.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. My headache was bothering me.
Quin glanced at me, and then, quite deliberately, caught Rose up in his arms. ‘Happy birthday, princess!’ He lifted her high above his head and grinned at her. He set her down, and I tried not to sigh. He touched her so easily. Quin couldn’t read minds at all, so there were no nasty thorns tormenting his psyche as he
touched her pale skin. The sight of Quin’s blue skin against hers did strange things to my insides. ‘It’s so nice to see you finally admitting to your age,’ Quin said. ‘But I think you forgot to mention exactly how many years ago you reached it.’
Bren was the only one who chuckled. He took Rose’s stass history in his stride. Rose had already learned that the best way to deal with Quin was with
a series of impassive silences and occasionally rolled eyes. The eyes were important, otherwise he thought you hadn’t heard him, and he’d keep saying whatever was rudest until he got some kind of reaction. She rolled her eyes and turned back to welcome the rest of us.
‘What do you want to do?’ she asked. ‘Swim first, or eat?’
Penny clapped her hands and jumped up and down. ‘
Swim!’
she signed,
waving her hands as if splashing through the water.
‘I agree!’ said Kayin, who loved swimming.
Tristan snapped her fingers and looked at Bren. With a look of challenge on her face she mimed playing tennis.