The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (51 page)

“It doesn’t matter where we came from,” Reeb said. “Nor where we’re going. That’s not how a satellite
like this works.”

“I think I’ve heard of this satellite,” Arso said. “Some prototype from the Sol system, isn’t it? You’re a long way from home. You were already old news when I was growing up.”

Enyo closed her eyes. She ran through her litany of dead. At the end, she added two new names:

Arso Tohl and Dax Alhamin.

She opened her eyes. “Let’s tell them how it works, Reeb,” she said.

“Enyo-Enyo
makes her own fate,” Reeb said. “Her fate is ours, too. We can alter that fate, but only if we act quickly. Enyo guides that fate. Now you’re part of it.”

Arso snorted. “If that’s so, you better hope this woman makes good decisions, then, huh?”

Reeb shrugged. “I gave up on hoping that many cycles ago.”

“All that we are is sacrifice,” Enyo’s first squad captain told her. “Sacrifice to our countries.
To our children. To ourselves. Our futures. We cannot hope to aspire to be more than that.”

“But what if I am more than that?” Enyo said. Even then, she was arrogant. Too arrogant to let a slight go uncommented upon.

Her squad captain smiled; a bitter rictus, shiny metal teeth embedded in a slick green jaw grown just for her. The skin grafting hadn’t taken. Enyo suspected it was because the
captain forgot the daily applications of salve. People would take her more seriously, with a jaw like that.

“I know what you did, Enyo,” her squad captain said. “I know who you are. This is how we mete out justice on the Venta Vera arm, to war criminals.”

The captain shot her. It was the first time Enyo died.

As Enyo gazed up from the cold, slimy floor of the carrier, her blood steaming in
the alien air, her captain leaned over her. The metal teeth clicked. Close enough to kiss.

The squad commander said, “That is how much a body is worth. One makes no more difference than any other. Even the body of the woman who started the war.”

As her life bled out, Enyo’s heart stopped. But not before Enyo reached up and ate half her captain’s spongy artificial jaw.

Enyo secured her comrade’s
skull in the jellied dampener beside her. All around her, the spore trembled and surged against its restraints. Reeb had created it just an hour before and clocked in the elliptical path it must take to get them to the rocky little
exoplanet where the cargo waited. The spore was ravenous and anxious. Dysmonia already lay immersed at the far end of the spore. She looked terribly peaceful.

Dax
eased herself back into her own jellied dampener. Torso submerged, she remained sitting up a moment longer, cool eyes wide and finally, for the first time, fearful.

“Whose skull is that?” Dax asked.

Enyo patted the dampener. “Yours,” she said.

Dax snorted. “You’re so mad.”

“Yes,” Enyo said.

Arso pushed through the still-slimy exterior of the spore and into the core where they sat. She spit
a glob of the exterior mush onto the floor, which absorbed it hungrily.

“You sure there’s no one on that rock?” Arso said.

“Just the abandoned colonists,” Reeb murmured from the internod. The vibrations tickled Enyo’s ears. The tiny, threadlike strands tucked in their ear canals were linked for as long as the living tissue could survive on their blood.

“It was simply bad timing on their part,”
Reeb said. “The forming project that would have made Tuatara habitable was suspended when they were just a few rotations away. They were abandoned. No one to welcome them.”

“No one but us,” Enyo said, and patted the skull beside her. For a long moment, she thought to eat it. But there would be time for that later.

“Filthy business,” Arso said.

Enyo unloaded the green fist of her weapon from
the gilled compartment above her. It molded itself neatly to her arm, a glittering green sheath of death.

“You have no idea,” Enyo said.

Enyo screamed and screamed, but the baby would not come. The rimwarder “midwife” she’d hired was young, prone to madness. The girl burst from the closet Enyo called home three hours into the birthing. Now Enyo lay in a bed soaked with her own perspiration and
filth. The air was hot, humid. Above her screams, she heard the distant sound of people working in the ventilation tube.

So it was Enyo who took her own hand. Who calmed her own nerves, who coached her own belabored breath. Enyo. Just Enyo.
Why was it always the same, every turn? Why was she always alone, in this moment, but never the others?

She pushed. She screamed herself hoarse. Her body
seemed to tear in two. Somewhere far away, in some other life, in some other snapshot, she was dimly aware of this moment, as if it were happening to some character in an opera.

The death dealers banged on the door and then melted it open. They saw she was simply birthing a child alone … so they left her. Sealed the room behind her. Like most rim filth, they hoped she would die there in childbed
and spare them the trouble. They could come back and collect her dead flesh for resale later.

Enyo grit her teeth and pushed.

The baby came. One moment, just Enyo. The next … a squalling, writhing mass no more sentient in that moment than a programmable replicator, but hers nonetheless. A tawny brown child with her own black eyes.

“Reeb,” she said.

She reached toward him. Her whole body trembled.

The second child was smaller, too thin. This was the one she would give away. The one who would pay her way to the stars.

This one she called Dysmonia.

Enyo voided the body for delivery. Capped all the tubes. A full turn about the galaxy in transit for a single delivery. A single body. Back to the beginning. How many times she had done this, she wasn’t certain. The satellite,
Enyo-Enyo,
revealed
nothing. Only told her when it was hungry. And when it was time to station itself, once again, on its place of origin.

She pushed the body’s pod over and it floated beside her, light as a moth’s wing. She placed her fingers on top of the pod and guided it down into the cargo bay. The body stirred gently.

The interior of
Enyo-Enyo
was mostly dark. Motionless. Not a sound. They were the last of
the living on
Enyo-Enyo
, this turn. They usually were. The satellite was hungry. Always so hungry. Like the war.

At the airlock, she stopped to bundle up. Stiff boots, gloves, parka, respirator. The air here was breathable,
Enyo-Enyo
told her, but thin and toxic if exposed for long periods. She queued up the first phase of the release and waited for pressurization.

The vibrating door became
transparent; blistering white light pushed away the darkness of the interior.

Ahead of her: a snow-swept platform. In the distance, a cavernous ruin of a mountain pockmarked with old munitions scars. A sea of frozen fog stretched from the platform to the mountain. As she watched, a thin, webbed bridge materialized between the mountain and the platform.

She waited. She had waited a full turn
around the galaxy to come back here, to Eris. She could wait a couple terrestrial turns more.

The moisture of her breath began to freeze on the outer edges of her respirator. It reminded her of the first time she had come here to Eris.

Bodies littered the field, and Enyo moved among them, cloaked in clouds of blood-rain. The nits she had infected herself with collected the blood spilled around
her and created a shimmering vortex of effluvia that, in turn, devoured all it touched.

“You must not fight her,” the field commander shrieked, and Enyo knew some of the fear came from the waves of methane melting all around them as the frozen surface of Eris convulsed. “You must not stop her. She is small now. You must leave her alone, and she will stay small. If you fight her she will swell
in size and grow large. She will be unstoppable.”

But they fought her. They always fought her.

When she took the field, she flayed them of their fleshy spray-on suits and left them to freeze solid before they could asphyxiate, flailing in sublime methane.

There had to be sacrifices.

As she stood over the field commander, making long rents in her suit, the commander said, “If it’s a war your
people want, it’s a war they’ll get.”

When it was over, Enyo gazed up at the thorny silhouette of the colonial superpod that the squad had tried to protect. Most of the Sol colonists started from here, on Eris. She would need the superpod, later, or she could never be here, now. Sometimes one had to start a war just to survive to the next turn.

Enyo crawled up into the sickening tissue of the
superpod. She found the cortex without much trouble. The complicated bits of
genetic code that went into programming the superpod should have been beyond her, but she had ingested coordinates from her squad commander’s jaw, during some long-distant snapshot of her life that the satellite had created. Now the coordinates were a part of her, like her fingernails or eyelashes.

She kissed the cortex,
and programmed the ship’s destination.

Tuatara.

Reeb worked on one of the harvester ships that circled the Rim every four cycles. Enyo was twenty, and he was eighty-two, he said. He said he had met her before. She said she didn’t remember, but that was a lie. What she wanted to say was, “I remember giving birth to you,” but that, too, was a lie. The difference between memory and premonition
depended largely on where one was standing. At twenty, on the Mushta Mura arm, her “memories” were merely ghosts, visions, brain effluvia.

When she fucked Reeb in her twenty-year-old skin, it was with the urgency of a woman who understood time. Understood that there was never enough of it. Understood that this moment, now, was all of it. The end and the beginning. Distorted.

She said his name
when she came. Said his name and wept for some nameless reason; some premonition, some memory. Wept for what it all had been and would become.

“The satellite is a prototype,” the recruiter said. The emblem on her uniform looked familiar. A double red circle shot through with a blue dart.

They walked along a broad, transparent corridor that gave them a sweeping view of the marbled surface of
Eris. Centuries of sculpting had done little to improve its features, though the burning brand in the sky that had once been its moon, Dysmonia, made the surface a bearable minus-twenty degrees Celsius during what passed for summer, and unaided breathing was often possible, if not always recommended. The methane seas had long since been tapped, leaving behind a stark, mottled surface of rocky protuberances
shot through with the heads of methane wells. Beyond the domed spokes of the research hub’s many arms, the only living thing out there was the hulking mop of the satellite. Enyo thought it looked like a spiky, pulsing crustacean.

“A prototype of what, exactly?” she asked. Her debriefing on Io had been remarkably … brief.

“There’s much to know about it,” the recruiter said. “We won’t send you
out until you’ve bonded with it, of course. That’s our worry. That it won’t take. But … there is an indication that you and the satellite are genetically and temperamentally matched. It’s quite fortunate.”

Enyo wasn’t sure she believed in fortune or coincidence, but the job paid well, and it was only a matter of time before people found out who she was. The satellite offered escape. Redemption.
“Sure, but what
is
it?”

“A self-repairing – and self-replicating, if need be – vehicle for exploring the galactic rim. It will take snapshots – exact replicas – of specified quadrants as you pass, and store them aboard for future generations to act out. Most of that is automated, but it will need a … companion. We have had some unfortunate incidents of madness, when constructs like these are
cast off alone. It’s been grown from … well, from some of the most interesting organic specimens we’ve found in our exploration of the near-systems.”

“It’s alien, then?”

“Partially. Some of it’s terrestrial. Just enough of it.”

“It’s illegal to go mixing alien stuff with ours, isn’t it?”

The recruiter smiled. “Not on Eris.”

“Why Eris? Why not Sedna, or a neighboring system?”

“The concentrated
methane that will give you much of your initial inertia comes from Eris. The edge of the Sol system is close enough for us to gain access to local system resources at a low cost, but far enough away to … well, it’s far enough away to keep the rest of the system safe.”

“Safe from what?”

“There’s a danger, Enyo. A danger of what you could … bring back. Or perhaps … what you could become.”

Enyo
regarded the spiky satellite. “You should have hired some techhead, then.” She was not afraid of the alien thing, not then, but the recruiter made her anxious. There was something very familiar about her teeth.

“You came highly recommended,” the recruiter said.

“You mean I’m highly expendable.”

They came to the end of the long spoke, and stepped into the
transparent bubble of the airlock that
sat outside the pulsing satellite.

“The war is over,” the recruiter said, “but there were many casualties. We make do with what we have.”

“It’s breathing, isn’t it?” Enyo said.

“Methane, mostly,” the recruiter said.

“And out there?”

“It goes into hibernation. It will need less. But our initial probes along the galactic rim have indicated that methane is as abundant there as here. We’ll go
into more detail on the mechanics of its care and feeding.”

“Feeding?” Enyo said.

“Oh yes,” the recruiter said. She pressed her dark hand to the transparent screen. Her eyes were big, the pupils too large, like all the techs who had grown up on Eris. “You’ll need to feed it. At least a few hundred kilos of organic matter a turn.”

Enyo gazed up at the hulk of the thing. “And where exactly am
I going to get organic matter as we orbit the far arms of the galaxy?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” the recruiter said. She withdrew her hand, and flashed her teeth again. “We chose you because we knew you could make those kinds of decisions without regret. The way you did during the war. And long before it.”