The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (50 page)

“Keisha
…”

Sugar Daddy had to have them here somewhere. Seemed like he had everybody else. I saw a group photo of a fraternity with a head in the back that coulda been a young Mr. Hughes. There were pictures of protestors watchin
the interstate construction. I looked for my family there among those people with picket signs and banners. I couldn’t find them.

“Girl, I’m gonna puke all over you!”

“Okay! Okay! Okay!” I threw the book down and wiped the tears from my face with my sleeves. But my sleeves were covered in dirt, and my eyes only stung more.

In the backyard, I gathered all of the photos and newspaper cutouts
I could find. I didn’t care if I got bit. I didn’t care if chiggers dug into my arms. The sun had gotten to some of the photos.
Peoples’ faces disappeared behind fading colors the shape of cigarette burns. I could make out an eye, the side of a mouth, or hand, but the rest of em was gone. Houses missed roofs, or store windows had faded out. Tey was across the alley before he noticed I wasn’t followin.

“What you doin?”

“We have to save them!” I showed him my handful of photos and articles.

“We have to tell somebody there’s a old dead cat in that house.”

I went back to the porch and put the photos and newspaper cutouts in a neat stack. I put a rock on top of them to make sure they didn’t blow away. I gasped and ran farther down the creek, under the bridge where the train tracks went overhead.
Way in the distance was the farm land on the TSU campus. I had no idea how far from home I was. There weren’t no buildings out here.

“Pick up everythin you can find.”

“Keisha, we gotta go.”

“Pick em up!” I yelled.

Paper clogged a drain. It was soggy and looked like it never had words or faces on it at all. We took up a few of Sugar Daddy’s photos out from the rocks and on the banks where the
sun had baked some of em blank.

Tey sighed and rolled his eyes. “Keisha, come
on!
It’s all ruined.” He dropped the washed out photos back into the water.

I dug into the wet newspaper to see if I could make out any names, any faces. Put pages back together so I could bring the people back. There was nuthin that made sense. Just mush and clumps of black and grey. I crawled through the rocks. My
knees turned up more drowned clippings and pictures the light bleached out.

“No! No! No!” I pounded on the rocks and cut my hands. I gathered all the photos I could and shuffled through them. “We have to save em all. We have to save em
all!
We can’t lose no more. We have to put em back where Sugar Daddy had em!”

“Keisha? You okay? Keisha?” I heard him comin up behind me. He put his hand on my
arm and drew it back real fast when I screamed.

I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to scream at all, but it came roarin outta me til I thought my throat might bleed. I found a man
I recognized in one of the photos. Sugar Daddy must have been on the opposite sidewalk when he took the picture on Jefferson Street. Maybe it was the day of TSU’s Homecoming Parade. Girls were twirlin their batons in the
street. The man watched them go by with a little girl sittin on his shoulders. The man had water-wave hair, and he wore thick, black frames. Sometimes I couldn’t exactly remember Daddy’s face, even though I should have, even though it hadn’t been that long since I last saw him. But I didn’t forget his chin. This man had a chin like Daddy’s, and I sat on his shoulders with a big grin on my face,
arms raised. The sun had gotten to this picture too. Some of the crowd had disappeared behind white spots. On my little arm, from the wrist and up to my elbow, I had been erased.

I couldn’t breathe. I sucked in air and screamed like I lost my mind, and maybe I had. I gasped and sobbed so hard my head fell in and I sucked up water. Tey pulled me out and wrung the water out my braid. He looked
over my shoulder at the photo tremblin in my hand. Then he fell on his knees beside me. All we could do was listen to me wail.

We just sat there in the middle of the creek with dirt and newspaper clingin to our skin. The sun dried our backs. I wiped the photo dry against my chest and tucked it in my undershirt before any of the rest of me faded away.

ENYO-ENYO

Kameron Hurley

Enyo meditated at mealtimes within the internod, huffing liquor vapors from a dead comrade’s shattered skull. This deep within the satellite, ostensibly safe beneath the puckered skein of the peridium, she went over the lists of the dead.

She recited her own name first.

Enyo’s memory was a severed ocular scelera; leaking aqueous humor, slowing losing shape as the satellite
she commanded spun back to the beginning. The cargo she carried was unknown to her, a vital piece of knowledge that had escaped the punctured flesh of her memory.

She had named the ship after herself –
Enyo-Enyo
– without any hint of irony. The idea that Enyo had any irony left was a riotous laugh even without knowing the satellite’s moniker, and her Second, Reeb, amused himself often at her
shattering attempt at humor.

After the purging of every crew, Reeb came into Enyo’s pulpy green quarters, his long face set in a black, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood.

“Why don’t we finish out this turn alone?” he would say. “We can manage the internod ourselves. Besides, they don’t make engineers the way they
did eight turns ago.”

“There’s the matter of the prisoner,” she would say.

And he would throw up his dark, scarred hands and sigh and say, “Yes, there’s the prisoner.”

It was Enyo’s duty, her vocation, her obsession, to tread down the tongue of the spiraling umbilicus from the internod to the holding pod rotation of the satellite, to tend to the prisoner.

Each time, she greeted the semblance
of a body suspended in
viscous green fluid with the same incurious moue she had seen Justice wear in propaganda posters during the war. Some part of her wondered if the body would recognize it. If they could talk of those times. But who knew how many turns old it was? Who knew how many other wars it had seen? On a large enough scale, her war was nothing. A few million dead. A system destroyed.

The body’s eyes were always closed, its sex indeterminate, its face a morass of dark, thread-like tentacles and fleshy growths. Most sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the black fungal sucker fused to the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy
of fulfillment.

Enyo usually went straight back to the internod to recite her lists of dead, after. But she had been known to linger, to sit at the flat, gurgling drive that kept her charge in permanent stasis.

She had stopped wondering where the body had come from, or who it had been. Her interest was in pondering what it would become when they reached its destination. She lost track of time
in these intimate reveries, often. After half a rotation of contemplation, Reeb would do a sweep of the satellite. He would find her alive and intact, and perhaps he would go back to playing screes or fucking one of the engineers or concocting a vile hallucinogen the gelatinous consistency of aloe. They were a pair of two, a crew of three, picking up rim trash and mutilated memories in the seams
between the stars during the long night of their orbit around the galactic core.

When they neared the scrap belt called Stile, Enyo was mildly surprised to see the collection of spinning habited asteroids virtually unchanged from the turn before.

“It’s time,” she told Reeb. “Without more fuel, we won’t make it the full turn.” And she would not be able to drop off the prisoner.

He gave her his
winter look. She had left the last of his engineers on a paltry rock the color of foam some time before. He did not know why they needed the crew now; he did not have her sense of things, of the way time moved here. But he would be lonely. It’s why he always agreed to take on another crew, even knowing their fate.

“How many more?” he said.

“This is the last turn,” she said. “Then we are finished.”

She let Reeb pick the new crew. He launched a self-propelled spore from the outernod well ahead of their arrival on the outskirts of Stile. The dusty ring of settlements within the asteroid belt circled a bloated, dying star. Had it been dying the last time they passed? Enyo could not remember.

Reeb’s sister worked among the debris, digging through old spores and satellites, piecing together
their innards, selling them as pirated vessels imbued with the spirit of cheap colonial grit.

Enyo had not seen Reeb’s sister in many turns, when speaking of the war, of genocide – in terms outside the propagandic – was still new and unsettling and got them thrown out of establishments. Broodbreeders and creep cleaners called them void people, diseased, marked for a dry asphyxiation aboard a
viral satellite, drifting ever aimless across limitless space. They were not far wrong. Sometimes Enyo wondered if they really knew who she was.

She heard Reeb’s sister slide up the umbilicus into the internod. Heard her hesitate on the threshold, the lubrication of the umbilicus slick on her skin.

“This your satellite?” Reeb’s sister asked.

Enyo had expected to feel nothing at her voice, but
like the body in the tank, she was sometimes surprised at what was fed to her. Something in her flared, and darkened, and died. It was this snapshot of Reeb’s sister that she always hoped was the true one. The real one. But she knew better.

She swiveled. Reeb’s sister did not take up the tubal port as Reeb did, but inhabited it in the loose way the woman inhabited all spaces, wrapping it around
herself like a shroud, blurring the edges of her surrounds – or perhaps Enyo’s eyes were simply going bad again. The satellite changed them out every quarter turn. The woman had once had the body of a dancer, but like all of them, she had atrophied, and though she was naturally thin, it was a thinness borne of hunger and muscle loss. Her eyes were black as Reeb’s, but their color was the only feature
they shared. She was violet black to Reeb’s tawny brown, slight in the hips and shoulders, delicate in the wrists and ankles, light enough, perhaps, to fly.

“Reeb says you need a sentient spore specialist,” the woman said.

“Yes, we have one last pickup. I need you to aid in monitoring our spore for the drop. I’m afraid if you do not, the prisoner may escape.”

“The prisoner?”

Enyo had forgotten.
This woman had not met them yet. She did not know. Something inside of Enyo stirred, something dark and willfully forgotten, like a bad sexual encounter.

“Where are the others?” Enyo asked.

“Aren’t you going to ask my name?”

“I already know it,” Enyo said.

The day Reeb’s sister was born, Enyo had named her “Dysnomia.” She had cursed all three of them that day, and perhaps the universe, too.
One could never be quite certain.

Nothing had ever been the same after that.

Because she could not go back. Only around.

The sound of the machines was deafening. Enyo stood ankle-deep in peridium salve and organic sludge. Ahead of her, Reeb was screaming. High pitched, squealing, like some broodmeat. But she could not see him.

Then the siren started. A deep-seated, body-thumping wail that
cut deep into her belly. Now we turn, she thought. This is a very old snapshot.

Ahead of her, a few paces down the dripping corridor, Dax battered her small body against the ancient orbital entryway. Her tears mixed with sweat and grease and something far more dangerous, deceptive. Grew florets spiraled up the bare skin of her arms from wrist to elbow.

Enyo raised the fist of her weapon and
called the girl back, “Don’t go down there! Not there! The colonists are this way.”

“I’m not leaving them!” Dax sobbed. Her white teeth looked brilliant in the darkness. What animal had she harvested them from? “I know what you did! I know you started this. You set this all in motion.”

Enyo admitted that she had not expected it would be Dax who went back. Her memories were not always trustworthy.

The satellite took a snapshot.

Reeb’s tastes were predictable in their disparity. He brought up his new crew to meet with Enyo in the internod. The first: a pale, freckled girl of a pilot whose yellow hair was startling in the ambient green glow of the dermal tissue of the room. Enyo could not remember the last time she’d seen yellow hair. The war, maybe. The girl carried no weapons, but her
hands were lean and supple, and reminded Enyo of Reeb’s hands when he was in his sixties: strong, deft, capable. Not what he was now, no, but what he would
become.

The other crewmember was a mercenary: a tall, long-limbed woman as dark as the girl was light. Her head was shaved bald. She wore a silver circlet above her ears, and half of her left ear was missing. She carried a charged weapon at
either hip, and a converted organic slaying stick across her back. She smelled of blood and metal.

“Do they have names?” Enyo asked Reeb.

“Dax Alhamin,” the little pilot said, holding out her hand. It was a rude affectation picked up by many of the young, to touch when first meeting. They did not remember how the war had started, with a nit-infected warmonger who murdered superpod after superpod
of colonists with a single kiss. Or perhaps they had simply forgotten. Enyo was never sure what side of the curtain she was on. The satellite distorted the universe at its leisure, often at her expense.

The other one, the mercenary, laughed at the open hand the girl proffered and said, “I’m Arso Tohl. I heard you have cargo that needs … liberating.”

Dax pulled her hand back in. She was smiling
broadly. Her teeth were too white to be real. Even if she was the twenty years she looked, no real person had teeth like that – not even a rim world god. Not even a warmonger.

“It’s necessary,” Enyo said. “We need to get back to the beginning.”

“The beginning?” Dax said. “Where did you come from?”