Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition

by Matthew Howard

  The water inside Mags’ suit rose above her eyes. The ship would not come into focus. She released a puff of breath, expelling carbon dioxide to force oxygen into her cells. Though she heard Plutonian’s voice, and Celina’s, she could not make out the words inside her shell.

  For a moment, Meteor Mags felt today would be just as good a day to die as any other. In a radiant graveyard of stars, surrounded by friends, she could find the peace which had eluded her all her life. She could finally let go.

  But she thought of Patches, and she wanted nothing more than to see her baby kitten one more time. It would be too easy to surrender. Her mother never surrendered. Never.

  In the eternal funeral of space, bathed in the light of stars which died billions of years before, Mags made her breath a prisoner inside her.

  It was silent then. The water completely filled her suit. In her mind, Mags reached out for her calico companion. She wanted to hold her pet, to whisper she loved her and stare into those green eyes with an understanding denied those who were purely human. In that reach, her fingers found the edge of Plutonian’s airlock.

  Celina tumbled past her into the interior. She spilled across the floor, pulling Mags inside by the tether connecting them. “Shut the fucking airlock!” Not waiting for Plutonian to do it, she leapt to her feet to close the hatch.

  He beat her to it. “Done!”

  The airlock door sealed, and the room started to pressurize. Before it was complete, Celina’s hands were on the fasteners holding Mags’ helmet in place. She pressed her helmet to Mags’ and screamed, “Don’t you die on me now, goddamn you!”

  The shout came through Mags’ helmet as an indistinct hum. But through the glass, she saw her friend’s face above her.

  Then she blacked out.

  Celina tore her friend’s helmet away, releasing a gush of water that splattered on the floor. Mags sprawled in the puddle, motionless.

  Celina grabbed a fistful of Mags’ hair to support her head. Grasping the rim of the suit where the helmet had attached, she pulled her friend’s torso upright. “Wake the fuck up!” She shook the smuggler. “Daughter of a whore! Wake up!” Celina pounded Mags on the back with the ball of her fist.

  Mags vomited a plume of water across the floor. She gasped and coughed and gasped again. With the back of her glove, she wiped a stream of snot from her face. “Celina?”

  “Yeah, baby!” Mags’ partner in crime gripped her in a bear hug.

  Mags coughed again. “I love you. But if you ever talk shit about Mama again, Imma fuckin’ kill ya.”

  Celina’s laughter echoed from the walls like the ringing of a hundred luminescent bells. “You can try!”

  Mags laughed too, then coughed. She ejected a fresh glob of water-logged mucus onto Celina’s suit. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. What’s a little biological warfare between friends?”

  Mags sighed and shook her head. “This bloody day.” She pushed herself up to peel off her suit. “I’m soaked to my socks.” A pile of wet clothing and spacesuits formed on the floor. Mags stripped to her underwear, then threw it on the pile, too. “So. Ready to meet some space monkeys?”

  What they saw next stopped them in their tracks. On the other side of the airlock, inside Plutonian’s ship, Karpov and his crew raised their tiny fists in salute. They had noticed the Hyades’ arrival, known it could only mean the return of Meteor Mags, and gathered to welcome her.

  Behind the macaques, mounted on the wall, hung a board two meters tall and almost as wide. Painted in brilliant red, the same hue as Mags’ current hair color, it depicted her in the dance she had performed on her last visit. The portrait showed her with arms raised and folded behind her head. Her face was tilted slightly down in a gesture at once seductive and supremely confident.

  In black, the monkeys had painted her vast array of star tattoos and the word anarchy across the top of her breasts. Behind her image rose a ringed planet in a black field salted with gleaming white stars.

  Celina whispered “Damn.”

  Mags raised her fist in salute. “Fuck yes.” Her smile curled into a vicious curve. “That’s going on our next album!”

  Celina also made the salute. “That’s beautiful, Mags.”

  “I’ll say.” The smuggler tried to recall Russian words Plutonian had used, but only one came to mind. She met Karpov’s expectant gaze. “Tovarisch.”

  The word of friendship pleased the monkey to no end. He stepped up to her, chattering rapidly.

  When last she had spoken to the crew, Mags had been under the sway of the triglyph’s mysterious power. Without it, the language barrier remained between their species. But the meaning of his approach was clear. Mags knelt before the monkey, and she wrapped her naked arms around him. “I love it,” she cooed in his ear. “Well-done, my little comrade.”

  The lyrical tone of her speech told Karpov all he needed to know. The flame-haired goddess had accepted his crew’s gift, and she was happy with it. Her embrace filled him with a glow not often felt in his crew’s long, lonely stay on their nameless asteroid. Had he been the sort of primate who shed tears, he would have shed one then.

  “It’s time, dear. Are you ready to sail?”

  Karpov understood the meaning. He barked orders to his crew, who quickly dispersed.

  “What are they doing?” Celina asked.

  “I’m guessing they’re gathering the females. Their micro-society is sort of divided between the males and females. The two groups like each other well enough, but they keep to themselves. It’s a macaque thing.”

  “I see,” said Celina, not really seeing at all. “Who taught them how to paint?”

  Mags stood and put her hands on her hips. She admired the artwork before her. “I’d say the little blighters worked that out for themselves. Then again, I heard them sing folk music last time I was here, so I wonder if they haven’t preserved more culture than we realize on this godforsaken rock.”

  The piratical pair made its way to the helm of Plutonian’s ship and prepared it for spaceflight. In no time at all, Karpov’s crew returned with the females. The ship filled with the hustle and bustle of macaques finding places for the personal possessions they had chosen to take with them.

  The matriarch of the crew came up to Mags and planted a kiss on her cheek. She gestured through the viewport and said something the smuggler wished Plutonian was there to translate.

  “I think the old bird likes you,” said Celina.

  “Aye,” said Mags. “Let’s hope she likes her new home, too.” She sealed off the ship and started to undock. “We’ll park in the Hyades, and then we’ll be on our way.”

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Within the caverns of an uncharted asteroid, an inhuman mind meditated upon the nature of time, the fates of stars, and all it had learned in the past two months. To assign an identity to this mind would be problematic indeed, for it was composed of hundreds of beings, each with eight neuron-filled tentacles.

  The group mind of Mags’ mutant octopuses included the mind of their mother, who had merged with them. And the mother’s consciousness had been expanded to include the scientists who created her, plus all she had learned in her union with Mags and Patches.

  In the cool water filling the cavern swarmed a synthesis of all these minds. Food concerned it on a basic, biological level, but the goddesses had promised more food, and the mind believed this promise with a faith both animal and religious. Direct communion with the goddesses left no room for doubt.

  But the cephalopodic group mind was not so simple as to petition its goddesses with prayer. Those who lived beyond the water had their own agendas. They required no worship. They only loved with all their hearts, and it was joy enough for this mind to bask in that love’s radiant beauty—and return it.

  In honor of the star-covered object of their love and her calico companion, the meditating octopuses began what could only be called a song. Instead of vocalizing, they sang in silent, electric impulse
s flashing between their synapses.

  For structure, they plundered Mags’ vast musical memory. The raga and tala of India’s classical music formed the basis for drone, melody, and rhythm. From Patches’ memories, the octopuses took bird songs, buzzing insects, and the whispered symphonies the wind writes with leaves and the water lapping at the riverbank.

  At will, the group mind could summon any sound it had ever known, and shape it. Saxophones and jet engines wove through a tapestry of human voices—from Mags’ first cries as a baby, to the Latvian women’s choir. Mags’ awareness of twelve-tone composition informed the singing as much as her mastery of James Maxwell’s equations. To the octopuses, knowledge existed all at once and everywhere, without conceptual boundaries.

  Humans have often said music is the universal language. But to the swirling mass of mental power in the asteroid cavern, music was the very substance of the universe. The octopuses sang, and they waited without hurry or expectation, creating an object of unparalleled wonder for their feline goddesses of creation and destruction.

  Then they felt one growing nearer.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  “Man, am I glad to have my gear back,” said Plutonian. He and Mags sat in the Hyades’ cabin. Celina and Alonso played with the macaques in the next chamber, getting to know them despite their language barrier. “So, what are you going to name this odd-ball aquarium of yours?”

  “How about the Think Tank?”

  “Lame.”

  “Why don’t you ask your furry friends what they think?”

  “What is your problem with them, anyway?”

  “Bloody simian Stalinists.” Mags lit a smoke. “I mean, they’re nice and all. I love the painting they made me. I just hate the government they remember so fondly. They remind me of the communist fucks who killed Mama.”

  Plutonian searched her face. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”

  He changed the subject. “Let’s give them a chance to see it first.”

  “Whatever you say, dear. I just—” Abruptly, she stood. She stared out the viewport, entranced. Her crimson tail flicked twice before settling, until only the tip waved slowly back and forth.

  “What is it, Mags?”

  “You don’t hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  Mags closed her eyes and gripped the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “I hear you, babies.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She was silent for a moment, then she hummed a single note. She hummed it again, then two notes, and three, and five, and eight. The fragments became a melody.

  Alonso walked into the cabin. “You writing a song, tía?”

  “No,” she said. “They are.”

  “Who, the monkeys? They’re just showing Celina some kind of Russian dance back there. Pretty chill little vatos, if you ask—”

  “Not them, damn it. My octos!”

  Alonso raised his eyebrows and looked inquisitively at Plutonian. He jerked his thumb towards Mags then spun his finger in a circle near his temple in a universal gesture for insanity.

  Plutonian stifled a laugh and quietly waved his hand. “You can hear them?”

  “Listen.” She continued the unusual melody. It always came back to the same note, then repeated everything before adding a new string of notes and starting over.

  “Sounds kind of repetitive,” said Alonso. “Does it got a chorus or something?”

  “It’s a pattern,” said Plutonian.

  Mags faced her friends. “A simple pattern. It’s the Fibonacci sequence. They’re increasing the number of notes in the melody by adding the numbers of the previous two statements.”

  “Trippy,” said Alonso. “But if you do that, then pretty soon you got a fuck-ton of notes that go on forever.”

  Plutonian’s eyes lit up. “We’ve gotta record that!”

  A lusty fire filled the smuggler’s eyes, and her teeth showed between the black of her painted lips. “Oh, hell yeah, we do. But it’s not even sound, it’s like—” Suddenly, she fell to the floor. She held both sides of her head and moaned.

  Celina ran into the cabin. “What the hell is going on in here? Mags!” She got on the floor with her friend and cradled her. “Maggie!”

  The pirate’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she groaned like an animal in pain.

  “The fuck is happening?!” Celina demanded, holding Mags to her breast.

  Alonso held up his hands. “Hey. She said they’re making a song, and then she totally freaked out!”

  “It’s her pets,” said Plutonian.

  “I’ll fucking pet you,” Celina said. “What did you—”

  Mags cried out again, and the sound sent chills up and down their spines. Tears streamed across her face. She convulsed in Celina’s embrace. Her body went rigid, and she gasped for breath.

  “Mags!” Plutonian was on his knees beside her. He clutched her hand.

  Alonso witnessed what very few people outside that cabin ever had. In the early days of the Sterile Skins, they had played extremely rough joints, and Mags was the band’s de facto tour manager. Alonso had watched her dismember a room full of criminals with her bare hands, and she had writhed on stage next to the band in the most provocative dances he had ever seen. But he had never known her to do what she did just then.

  Meteor Mags shuddered from her head down to her toes, and she let loose the painfully ecstatic shouts of a woman in orgasm. At the entryway to the cabin, the macaques gathered to see the commotion.

  “It’s okay, Maggie,” said Plutonian. “It’s—”

  Her eyes fixed on the cabin ceiling. They flared a green, burning light like copper caught in a flame. “It’s the Mersenne primes.” She wiped away tears. “They cracked it!”

  “You’re the one who’s cracked, tía. You just got your brain deep-fried by your own calamari!”

  Mags glared. “Don’t you even joke about eating my little squidlings!” She peered into Celina’s eyes. “Thank you, dear.”

  “Wagtail, you’ve got to slow the fuck down. You’re scaring the shit out of me!”

  The smuggler freed her hand from Plutonian’s grip, placed it on the cabin floor, and pushed herself up. “Fibonacci was just a warm-up. They wanted to show me they cracked it. I can’t believe they did it so fast.”

  Plutonian asked, “What’s a mursin prime?”

  “Mersenne,” she said. “A prime number that is one less than a power of two. This morning, I worked out a proof about them. I only got as far as showing the minima and maxima for the thousandth one. But those little eight-armed bastards, they just sang it to me. The exact number. Then they sang me the millionth one! That number’s so big you couldn’t write it out if you dedicated your entire life to it.”

  Celina scowled. “The hell are they doing on that rock?”

  “Math.” Mags smoothed her hair into place. “Math, and music. They don’t see the difference. They—” A wave of tension and release ran through her body like an aftershock. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered.

  She didn’t say another word, staring into the limitless depth of space. The stars glittered like a sea of jewels and undiscovered futures. Splashed across the blackness, they reached back to the beginning of time itself. They extended farther than anyone could travel in a billion lifetimes.

  Though Meteor Mags believed the sky belonged to her, she also believed that beyond the sky awaited things no human mind could comprehend or even hope to encounter.

  At least, not alone.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Soon, the Hyades rested near the entrance to the asteroid’s subterranean laboratory.

  “Let me go first,” said Mags. “You all can take the elevator down, but I need to have a word with my babies.”

  Alonso called out, “Company’s coming!”

  “Aye. And we don’t need a bloody mind-meld right now. Just let me tell them to chill for a bit, bef
ore we all get our circuits completely blown.”

  “Might be a little late for some of us.” Celina waved good-bye.

  “You’re a real riot, convict.” With a flick of her tail, Mags stormed off to see her cephalopods.

  Down the elevator, through the hallways of the empty laboratory, Mags whistled fragments of the Fibonacci melody. She came to the hole she blasted in the wall on her last visit, where once a locked door had separated the lab from the caverns beyond. Now, a shimmering light like a borealis shone through the ragged portal. Whether it was bioluminescence or just the octopuses playing tricks with her mind, Mags could not be sure.

  She stepped through.

  While Mags was engaged with her eight-armed admirers, her crew and the macaques took the elevator in groups down into the asteroid. They gazed in awe at the massive machineries filling the lab: the shattered tanks where sea animals had endured genetic experiments, the consoles where scientists controlled the environment and compiled their data, and the extravagant networks of plumbing and electrical lines rising up the rough-hewn walls and across the ceiling like a mechanized cathedral. The primates ran here and there, touching and smelling everything, chattering excitedly in their native tongue.

  Mags joined them fifteen minutes later. She dripped water from her disheveled hair, and the fur on her tail was sopping wet. She had three distinct sucker marks on her neck, a trio of purple bruises.

  Celina looked her up and down. “The hell were you doing in there? Having a swim?”

  “Don’t ask.” Mags squeezed a handful of water from her tail. The droplets spattered on the carved stone floor. “I think they’ll be cool, but be careful around them. They aren’t used to visitors.”

  The matriarch and Karpov reached a decision about the surrounding wonders and the potential this new home held for them. The elder female spoke to Plutonian.

  The DJ replied in her language before sharing the macaques’ wishes with his crew. “Svoboda,” he said. “It means ‘freedom’. In honor of their ancestors’ ship, they want to use the number nine.”