by Love, Aimee
“Survival,” he said. “Plain and simple.”
“Of course! The fish! You feed them. But what did they eat before you came?”
“This ice age is pretty new,” he explained. “There’s plenty of evidence of large land animals from as recently as a thousand years ago.”
“That’s still a big gap,” I said doubtfully.
“Well, we think they must have been eating each other, or themselves, depending on how you look at it.”
“Their extra legs?” Yuck. The more I learned about the things the less I liked them.
“I still don’t see how all this leads to you not wanting to have sex with me,” I finally told him, hoping to lighten the mood.
“You have to understand that we’re all conditioned. We find arousal terrifying and terror arousing. That’s why Titus wasn’t shocked at what he thought Julian had done to you.”
“But Julian didn’t actually do anything and even if he had, you’re a different man, a better man. Conditioning can be undone.”
“I appreciate the offer, but no. There are somethings that can never be undone, and I am a better man, which is why I’m going downstairs to sleep in my own bed.”
I sat on my perch thinking for a solid week, letting Quince and Sebastian occupy themselves with my wand to their hearts content. Cloning, to spite my earlier dismissal, seemed like the only possibility.
If the spiders were responsible, they certainly weren’t going about it in a very scientific or hygienic way. I doubted they had a secret, high tech lab in their little burrows, but it was just possible that they possessed some kind of natural ability. There were species on Earth that could essentially clone themselves, sharks and turkeys sprung to mind, and I was almost willing to accept that it was possible for these creatures to be able to do something similar to other organisms.
I could see the usefulness of an adaptation that allowed a predator, after it had eaten its prey, to take some of that prey’s reproductive cells and hatch a whole clutch of its offspring. It would be participating in the continuation of its own food chain, like a weird cross between a cuckoo and a farmer. But it was still a very long way from that to cloning a member of an alien race. Everything I had ever been taught contradicted the possibility. Life on different planets had evolved so differently as to be incompatible on almost every level.
Still, the theory had several things in its favor. For one thing, if the people were being cloned, it explained why they needed me. If there was some other answer, there would have been female children as well and they could simply have seen if the plague were gone by observing them.
A teacher had once told me that if you accepted something as fact, you gave yourself permission to stop thinking about it. He’d meant it as a warning, but under the current circumstances, I decided to try it as a means of freeing myself to think about what I saw as the larger question and that was, how it could possibly have come about.
I’d seen the things. I doubted any man had ever looked on them with lust. So what had led to their current social structure? How had they gone from no women to mandatory spider sex? Even if they had somehow struck a deal with the things to clone them in exchange for food, an idea that was in itself pretty fantastic, why not just use the age old system of porn and test tubes? Men on Earth had been donating their genetic material that way for ages.
Whatever the answer was, I doubted I was going to find it sitting in my room.
“You what?” Sebastian gaped at me, then hurried over and shut the hatch so Quince wouldn’t hear.
“I want to meet one of them,” I told him again.
“You know,” he told me, sitting on the edge of the bed heavily, “I always wondered why such a beautiful and seemingly intelligent woman would agree to sell herself into a loveless marriage, but now I know. You’re completely insane.”
“Well, I hardly would have done so if I’d known your motives. I can see the application now. Wanted: Fertile, healthy woman to test for potentially fatal plague of indeterminate origin and possibly repopulate planet. Apply in person.”
“It’s a moon, not a planet,” he corrected.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” I told him. “You see them all the time. I just want a look. We can go down at night when everyones asleep.”
“You don’t understand,” he assured me.
“So explain it to me!”
“We call it a counting for a reason,” he said with a sigh. “They count us, and for every man who doesn’t show, two die. That’s their rule.”
“Wait, their rule?”
“If we were the ones calling the shots, we wouldn’t be the ones missing parts of our anatomy,” he pointed out.
Arms. Legs. Fingers. I looked at Sebastian. An eye?
“Julian said there were birth defects…”
“Julian,” he told me slowly, carefully annunciating every word, “is not a reliable source of information.”
“What if someone dies of natural causes?” I asked.
“We bring the body to them.”
“What if there isn’t a body? What if a boat sinks or something?”
“Then a lot of people die,” he said simply.
“But killing you off endangers their own survival. They need you.”
“And you want to go down and tell them that? Reason with them? Is that you’re plan?”
“I just want a look!”
“They’d kill you on sight,” he growled.
“Why?” I asked. “Do they have an oral tradition? A written history? How long do they live? They probably don’t even know what a woman is.”
“They would know you’re different,” he assured me. “And they don’t like change.”
“I can’t believe this,” I railed. “You’d rather just go on the way things are now than try to find answers? What about Quince? If what you say is true then he could die any time, not even because of something he did, but because of some random event.”
“People die because of random events all the time.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“With probably living another day? Yeah, I’m okay with that,” he snapped.
“I want to talk to Julian,” I said, convinced that I would get no further with him. “Tell him I don’t feel well.”
He shook his head.
“He’s a doctor. He might have some idea about how they…”
“He’s a collaborator,” he retorted. “He and Titus and the rest of them downstairs. They get privileges in exchange for keeping the rest of us in line. If he finds out you know, he’ll tell Titus in a heartbeat and you’ll be dead.”
“Why?” I demanded. “How does my knowing threaten them in any way?”
“Because if you know about them, then it increases the chance of them finding out about you and if that happens, if someone told them or they saw you, they would know Titus had some part in your being here and kill him.”
“Whoa,” I said. I’d been joking about an oral or written language. I thought of them as animals. But what he was saying implied not only that they were highly intelligent, but also that they did, in fact, have some way of communicating with us.
“They understand our speech?”
He shrugged.
“They certainly always know when one of us needs a little discipline, even if its related to something that they have no way of finding out about except being told. They do Titus’ bidding and he does theirs. How that comes about is a secret only he and his predecessors know, but it happens. Trust me.”
“They don’t even really have mouths. How can they talk?”
“Maybe they fed Titus some magic bean that makes him telepathic,” he said in exasperation.
“Telepathy is impossible,” I pointed out.
“More or less impossible than breeding with aliens?”
He had me there.
“Look,” he told me, almost gently. “Titus isn’t going to wait forever. Your children represent too much to him. They would shift the power into his hands. If he can successfully cultivate a reservoir of breeding females, then they have nothing we need but they still need us. They go from being our masters to our slaves. You’ve got to stop looking at this like a problem you can solve. It’s been going on for hundreds of years. You can’t fix it. It just is. What you should be doing is trying to decide what part you want to play in it. ”
He had a point, but what he didn’t realize was that I already knew my part in the system. I was the person who was going to end it.
It wasn’t immediately apparent what had woken me. I was afraid, as always, that I would hear the tell tale thump of a bird against the wall. Having seen what was down below, I was no longer eager for a glimpse of them. I often had nightmares of that first trip in the sled. Of being winced up the wall and seeing the carvings and admiring them until they came to life and flew at me, their extra wings detaching in flight and zooming toward me like little razor sharp torpedoes. I lay in bed for a moment, listening, but there was nothing.
There was hardly any light and I checked my watch, more out of habit than because I expected anything useful from it. It informed me that it was mid morning. I didn’t believe it at first, until I heard the boom of thunder and realized there must me a storm.
I fiddled with it for a moment, trying to determine if it had, in fact, finally calibrated itself. It told me that the days were 20.6 hours long and it had chopped them into 20 hours and left the extra time in a ‘gray period’. That seemed appropriate enough, since everything else here seemed to be gray. There were the gray skies and the gray areas of morality and the gray matter I was constantly having to use to try to navigate it all.
I heard voices downstairs and thought that Sebastian and Quince were playing a movie until I recognized Titus‘ affected drawl.
They were speaking in angry whispers, making them hard to hear, so I crawled under the bed and put my ear to the hatch, dialing up the volume on my implant just in time to get blasted my an ear shattering thud as Sebastian knocked on the other side of the hatch. I hastily turned the implant back off.
“I think you’d better come down here,” I heard him say through the ringing in my ears.
“In a second,” I called back.
I splashed some cold water on my face, pulled on a clean onesie, then moved the bed and went down.
Sebastian looked angry enough to throttle someone, not me I hoped, and Titus stood facing him, outwardly calm but with a dangerous set to his jaw and a fire in his eyes. Julian sat a little apart from them on the edge of one of the beds, looking guilty and refusing to meet my eyes. Ut oh.
“What’s going on?” I asked smoothly.
“He knows,” Sebastian told me darkly.
I wished he’d be more specific. There were so many deceptions, both large and small, between the four of us that it could be any number of things. Did Titus know that I had seen the spiders? Did Julian know that he hadn’t really beat me up?
“Knows what?” I asked innocently.
“Know that you weren’t actually doing as you were told,” Titus said, feigning helpfulness. “Knows that you and Julian only had sex the time he forced you and suspects that you aren’t, in fact, now bedding Sebastian.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. For a moment, I’d been afraid he knew who I really was.
The door opened and Quince came in with our breakfasts, buying me precious time to think.
“Can you take mine upstairs,” I asked him, “and wait for me there? We have a few personal things to discuss.”
He looked at Sebastian for permission and got a nod. When the hatch fell behind him, I was ready.
“That was Julian’s idea,” I told Titus easily, forcing myself to relax. “He didn’t want to have sex with me, but he was afraid you’d be angry if he refused. He told me to sleep with Sebastian instead, but not to tell.”
“That isn’t true!” Julian protested, but I talked right over him, holding Titus’ attention.
“I guess he thought that as long as I got pregnant, it wouldn’t matter to you. Then the last night he came over, he said Sebastian had said something about him not being a real man, and he’d decided to prove him wrong. I told him that I wasn’t going to be passed around like some play thing and refused, so he beat me.” I let my bottom lip quiver.
“He told me if I said anything to you about it, you’d believe him over me and… I was scared,” I admitted. “As soon as you gave me the option I told you I’d prefer Sebastian and I thought that since everything was open now it would be okay. I’m so sorry, but how am I supposed to tell who to trust when everyone has their own agenda and no one seems to care what happens to me?” I tried to sound forlorn.
“Ask Quince,” Sebastian put in, surprising me. “He’ll tell you that she comes down here in the evenings and stays with us. Usually we wait until he’s asleep until we go up to her bed, but he’s been awake and seen us more than once.”
I was amazed and thankful for his tidy little lie and how snugly it fit with my story.
Titus looked from one of us to the other and then turned his dark stare on Julian.
“Very well,” he said, looking back to me. “If all of this is true, then you won’t mind furnishing a little proof.”
Proof?
“If I could get pregnant at will I already would have,” I lied.
He sat down on the bed beside Julian and motioned me toward one of the others.
“Proof that you’re trying will do,” he said.
I took a deep breath and avoided the look I knew Sebastian must be giving me.
“Fine,” I said, letting my anger show. “Sebastian and I will go upstairs now and Julian can examine me afterwards.”
“Not good enough,” he told me.
I hadn’t really expected it to be that easy, but it had been worth a try.
“What, here?” I scoffed, pretending I hadn’t gotten his meaning.
He pointed to the other bed again.
“No,” I told him flatly, looking to Sebastian for support but seeing only a dark resolution on his features. I felt my stomach knot.
“I’ve done everything that was asked of me,” I protested. “But I will not suffer this indignity. I’m not a whore to put on a show for you. If that was what you wanted, you contacted the wrong kind of agency.”
“We tried those first,” he told me lightly, “but it turns out whores are more expensive than wives.”
His flippant manner was more infuriating than anything else. I’d endured a lot in my short life, and I doubted having sex with Sebastian would be the worst of it, but I’d be damned if I was going to let some egomaniacal little dictator get his jollies by watching.
“No,” I said again.
“Quince!” He yelled, surprising me.
Oh god, I thought. Please don’t let them bring him down to watch too. With those words echoing in my mind, I realized that I had already accepted what was going to happen and my arguments were just for forms sake. I shoved the idea away, rallying.
Quince came down and I stood stock still, wondering if I could make it up the ladder before I was caught. Sebastian was too close, and the look on his face too impregnable for me to risk it. I bided my time as Titus whispered something to Quince and he raced out the door like a shot.
I let out the breath I’d been holding, relieved that at least I wouldn’t be contributing to the boys trauma.
“If you do this,” I told Titus quietly, “you’ll be putting an end to my willing participation in your little game. You’d better be prepared to keep me a prisoner for the rest of my li
fe because I will never again willingly do as I’m told.”
“Noted,” he told me.
Quince dashed back in and my heart fell when I saw what was in his hands. Titus took the coil of rope from him and shoed Quince back upstairs.
He gave me a hesitant look and I forced a smile, praying he wouldn’t listen to what was about to happen.
It wasn’t as if it I’d never been tied up before, I told myself. Though it was certainly the first time it had been done against my will.
Titus tossed the rope to Sebastian and leaned back, preparing to enjoy the show. Julian, his guilt at turning me in replaced by anger at my blatant lies, still had the grace to look away from me.
I turned to Sebastian as he took a step toward me.
“You’ll regret this,” I breathed as he put a hand on my shoulder.
“I know,” he whispered, his voice a mix of anguish and dread.
“I don’t mean tomorrow,” I growled. “I mean now.”
I brought my foot down hard on the arch of his and ducked away from his grasp, throwing all my strength into my elbow as it connected with his kidney.
He reeled back, stunned by my attack, then set his shoulders.
“Stop,” he ordered me.
I kicked out, connecting with the side of his knee and making him grunt in pain. He was bigger by a foot and a hundred pounds, but he was still at a disadvantage since he didn’t really want to do hurt me and hurting him was my only aim. I knew there was nowhere to run, but I was damn sure not going down without a fight.
He grappled for me, grabbing a wrist and yanking me close.
“They’re enjoying this,” he snarled.
“Are you?” I asked, bringing my knee up into his groin with enough force to make his eye bulge out. He released me and I spun around, landing a roundhouse punch on his blindside and forcing him back and away. I dashed to the ladder and made it half way up before my legs were yanked out from under me.
I crashed to the ground, saw Sebastian still across the room, doubled over, blinked and realized that it was Julian who had pulled me off. I sprang to my feet and rounded on him.
