Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “You mean, like what the natives eat?”

  “Oh yes, I’ve developed a taste for it. Goodness knows I won’t find any when we go back.” He rose and stretched. “And by the by, the boy has a name: Maltoush. The sooner you start using it, the easier it will be.”

  As she watched him saunter into the bathroom, she blinked back tears. The stranger who inhabited her husband’s body had not melted away with the night. Before she realized it, she was crying.

  “What’s the matter, darling?” She had not heard her husband enter the room. Horrified, she turned away and hid her face in her pillow.

  “Nothing, nothing,” she said. “I just—I have a headache.”

  “Have you anything for it? Any medication?”

  She nodded and pointed to a small wooden box on a table across the room. By the time he returned to the bed, she had regained a semblance of calm.

  “What is it?” her husband asked as she opened the box to reveal a leather pouch and a tiny silver spoon.

  “Some tea. It helps to calm me.” She did not mention it was a mild narcotic called Mortroot. She had gotten it from one of the other women in their small community during the first few months of her isolation. Many of the colonist’s wives indulged in such drug use—and to far worse degrees. She only took a small spoonful each day, as too much could be fatal. She reached for the tiny bell that sat on her bedside table to ring for the boy, but her husband stopped her.

  “He’s probably in the middle of his morning prayers. They’re a very religious people, you know. I’ll bring you some hot water.”

  She did not know what to make of the offer. Her husband was the only son of a rich family and not used to doing his own chores, let alone for someone else. Was he implying she was a neglectful wife?

  He returned with a tray laden with a teapot of hot water, teacups, a bowl of maize porridge and a small platter piled high with fried bean cakes. Their spicy odour quickly filled the room. The wife hoped it wouldn’t seep into the furniture.

  “I was just talking to Maltoush about that party,” said her husband. “He says there are women in the market who can build us a canopied platform for half the usual price.”

  “Surely, you’re not going through with this party thing?” She was thankful she did not cry this time. Instead, she felt something cold and slick settling at the centre of her chest, coiling about her heart and slowly squeezing out her breath.

  “But of course! Darling, we can’t just leave here. We must say a proper good-bye.”

  “Goodbye to what?”

  “Why, to our friends, our memories, to this wonderful place.”

  She did not mention that she had no friends; she had stopped going visiting years ago. Nowadays, she never even left the house. And as for this place, she could not imagine what was so wonderful about the dirt, the heat or the near endless variety of deadly insects and dangerous animals. Even most of the flowers were poisonous. Her husband squatted by her bedside and grasped her hand.

  “Oh darling, I wish you had come with me. The interior is so full of wonders; it makes this place look like a grey-walled prison by comparison. If you had seen the things I’ve seen, I know you would understand. You would change your mind about everything.” With that, he swept out of the room.

  She had the feeling something precious was slipping through her fingers and no matter how much she tried to hold to it, sooner or later she would lose her grip and everything would come crashing down.

  “Maltoush!”

  The husband was calling to him from the veranda. Briefly, the servant considered ignoring him. He was already out of the house, halfway down the road that led out of the estate. This weekly shopping trip to the market was one of the servant’s few pleasures. Whatever the husband needed could surely wait until his wife was finished with the first of her three daily baths. But Maltoush was too well trained. He sighed inwardly, smoothed his face into a neutral mask and turned back.

  The husband had come out to meet him. That surprised him. Normally, these Civilized Men would wait until he came to them. In the morning light, Maltoush examined him closely. His hair was long now, almost like a mal of the Hives. He was wearing a white high-necked tunic with white trousers and his skin glowed gold with health and sunlight. The rour at his throat seemed oddly appropriate—as if it belonged there. Somehow, the husband seemed more of a child of the Forest than he was.

  “I need to know how much that canopied platform will cost,” the husband said.

  “Of course,” said Maltoush. “I shall enquire when I get to the market.”

  “Very good, we shall go together,” said the husband.

  “Together, sir?” Maltoush hoped he had misunderstood. He had never seen a Civilized Man in the marketplace and he did not relish the attention it would bring. Now, all the merchants would double their prices in hopes of pocketing some Imperial profit.

  “Oh yes, I love native markets. They are so alive and rich. Your people are so full of life, Maltoush. You are close to the earth. You haven’t forgotten how to live. And your women are so strong …” the husband continued, describing the life he had lived among the Hives of Forest. But as he talked, Maltoush struggled to recognize the place he spoke about. In the Hive that Maltoush remembered, people were no happier than any other.

  “I want to taste that freedom again,” the husband concluded. For a moment, Maltoush was tempted to tell him of his own life as a drudge in the Hive. Of the back-breaking labour, of the myriad rules that governed a mal’s life—down to what he ate and how he wore his hair—of how the only choice he’d had was to be the lifelong servant of a woman he did not love or to leave. At least among the Civilized Men he could choose his own mistress. And he was learning to read. Perhaps next year, he could apply to be a clerk at the river docks. He was tempted, but instead he smiled and bowed.

  “Of course sir,” he said and they began walking.

  The colonists’ estate was such a contrast to the Forest. Maltoush always marvelled at how clipped, and controlled it was. They laid down neat white roads of granite and sand. They cut down trees, an anathema among his people who uprooted and replanted them instead. Their houses were grey boxes with wide, flat roofs and long windows. Most had courtyards with gardens at their centre, though the mistress had had theirs closed off. It attracted insects, she had complained.

  Once past the high walls of the estate, Maltoush had to admit he felt a certain lightness of spirit. The estate sat on a hill and ahead of him, the land lay spread out in a vast tangled green. The husband was still talking, chattering away, but Maltoush wasn’t listening. It wasn’t as if he was expected to say anything anyway.

  As they descended towards the native settlement that had grown in the valley below, he looked up. The sky was a clear, cloudless blue, but he could smell the rain. It was coming.

  She was taking her afternoon nap when her husband burst into the room.

  “Darling, wake up! Wake up!” he called. She was immediately frightened, the husband she knew never raised his voice like this. He opened up the blinds and threw open the bedroom window. A fierce wind blew into the room flinging the curtains aside, throwing papers off the writing desk and blowing the sheets off the bed. “You must see this, come!”

  Before she had a chance to speak, he grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the window. The sky was roiling with thick, blue-black thunderclouds. Lightning forked out across the sky like ghostly fingers. The wind beat at the trees, violently whipping them back and forth. Flocks of birds veered frantically trying to find shelter from the coming storm. But in the growing gloom, she saw crowds of children, native children, their brown skins glowing, streaming out of the rude huts of the servants quarters. They converged on the wide lawn in front of the house dancing with excitement and anticipation. Then it started to rain. First, droplets as big as pebbles fell one by one—at almost polite intervals. Then the heavens opened and beat down its vengeance on the world. The water drove in through the open
window, wetting her and her husband, soaking her fine wool carpet, ruining her silk curtains.

  She stood, letting the rain beat at her for a time, but in the end, she tore herself from her husband’s grasp and ran crying from the room.

  “I never thought I would see the house so empty,” she said, on the night of the party. All day she had watched as her home was stripped bare to cater to the festivities. Her cushions, each specially chosen at colonial bazaars, were carted outside to serve as seats for guests under the canopied platform. Her furniture, commissioned specifically for each room, was either moved outside or shoved aside to allow guests freer access to her house. Even her pictures had been taken down, to prevent guests from damaging or stealing them.

  It’s all for the best, she thought. We would have had to pack them anyway, for the journey home. She stood in the middle of the front room, where she had waited to greet her husband a little over a week ago. It felt much, much longer.

  “You see, I told you it would all work out,” her husband came from behind and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m so nervous,” she said, giggling. She had not giggled since she was a child. It sounded oddly hollow to her. But her husband smiled.

  “Don’t be, with Maltoush helping, this will be a night to remember.”

  “Mel … touch? Mal … tush? Mal …. Oh, I just can’t say it!” She felt suddenly close to tears. “I just can’t!”

  “Darling, don’t worry. At least you’re trying.” He patted her shoulder and turned away. Just then, the doorbell rang. “Ah, good! Our guests are here. Maltoush! The door!”

  She was alone in the empty hall. Inside her, the cold slick thing that had grown up in her heart had become a vice, tightening its grip. She could not breathe without effort, but when her husband returned with the first of their guests, she forced a smile and went to greet them.

  I often wonder about that night. I should have done something, said something—I know. But there had been so much to do; I did not have time.

  I watched as guest after guest after guest arrived—in the end, there were more than we had prepared for. I was forced to ask two other mals who worked in neighbouring houses for help. For most of the night, we worked to make sure every glass was filled with drink and every plate brimming with food. I only remember passing my mistress once. She had been laughing—something that I had never seen her do. But what should have caught my attention was her hair. It was a tangled mess.

  I was washing up in the kitchen when I heard the screaming. By the time I rushed into the master’s bedroom she was already dead. I found him—the husband—sitting in the middle of the room cradling my mistress’s body. She had an empty cup in her lifeless fingers. The box of Mortroot tea was also empty. He looked up when I came in and, for a moment, he had the strangest look on his face. I could not read it then, but now I know.

  It was relief. Relief, I tell you.

  Oh yes.

  Do you know that among the Civilized Men, those who die by their own hands are considered unclean? Their act can taint their families for generations. If people knew what she had done, the husband would have lost his post here and they would have made him leave. The “freedom” that he so enjoyed? The fem who had claimed him as her own? All of that would have vanished. He would have been sent back to his homeland to live out his days as a pariah. Did you know that?

  You know, I did not struggle when they came for me; I told them what I knew. She was unhappy and she must have been upset when she discovered that night that her husband’s posting had been extended for another five years. Still, it was my word against his and so, here I am.

  I will never understand these Civilized Men, but I know this: in the end, they are only human.

  The Voyeur

  Ran Walker

  The old man eased from the shadows, his motions both fluid and easy as he lifted the camcorder into the sunlight. He adjusted the optical zoom, and just as he aimed it at the top of the building, the child stepped into view. The flowing satin fabric caught on the slight breeze, and damned if the kid didn’t really look like a superhero. The child placed his fists on either side of his waist and poked out his chest, taking in the moment. It was a thing of beauty, the old man thought while recording.

  The boy stepped to the edge of the building, his golden locks shifting with the wind.

  “You have to believe,” the old man whispered under his breath, adjusting his camcorder. He looked away for a moment to the group of children gathering below. They were doing just as he had instructed them. Now the real crowd would come.

  A woman looked upward and screamed, triggering a chain reaction among the swelling crowd.

  “Someone call 9-1-1!” a man yelled.

  The old man quickly lowered his camcorder to get a shot of the growing crowd, before returning his gaze to the boy who stood frozen like a statue atop the building. He could scarcely make out the boy’s face, but it was clear the boy’s posture and stance betrayed his ten-year-old body.

  Then the boy moved. It was a slight half-step, but everyone, including the old man, gasped collectively. It was a delicious moment, this child weighing his power over this world, his ability to transcend gravity and give himself over to his dreams. The old man smiled, his hand perspiring behind the camcorder.

  And without warning, the boy leapt off the building, his cape catching in the wind and trailing boldly behind him as he outstretched his arms so that his body became parallel with the earth. It was a beautiful sight, thought the old man, as he moved his camera with the child. The boy could really fly!

  But in the brief seconds of the boy’s commitment to flight, gravity wrapped its heavy hands around him, yanking him to the earth with such violent force that the boy seemed to disintegrate into a bloody dust as his body slammed against the concrete.

  When the old man later replayed the video, he admired that fleeting moment of the boy, prostrate against the wind, oblivious to the screams below, floating just off the roof of the building, his cape rippling perfectly behind him. He only hoped that the other children would be equally inspired. Surely there was one among them who viewed himself as bulletproof or capable of breathing under water.

  Pausing the video just before the child hit the sidewalk below, the old man smiled at the intensity of the child’s face.

  That boy was determined to fly—even until the very end.

  Life-pod

  Vandana Singh

  Sometimes the Eavesdropper remembered being a mother. She would stare at the single empty life-sac and think about the man who should have been lying there in cold sleep, the man who had once been the boy she’d held in her arms. At other moments she was convinced that she had done no such thing, that motherhood had never happened to her, that all she had ever been was what she was now: a traveler on an interminable journey between the stars, afloat in the belly of the Life-pod. At these moments, when even the human sleepers seemed to take on a terrifying unfamiliarity, she would feel as though she were at the edge of some calamitous discovery.

  But these hanging, empty moments of anticipation were few. Almost immediately she would be distracted by the thought-clouds, the dreams of the men and women in cold sleep. There were two of them in particular who had once meant something to her: a man and a woman. She returned to their thought-worlds whenever she herself was awake, as though the tattered clouds of their remembrances would bring back to her what she had been. It was rather like eating (she still remembered that, at least) and at the end, still coming away hungry. The life-sacs were filmy, translucent; she couldn’t see their faces, only the vague human shape suspended in a watery garden, but she knew them by their thought-signatures, by the worlds of their dreams.

  The Man

  The man dreamed obsessively of the enemy. Through him she saw the great creatures with their giant, stiff wings (single, like a cloak) folded on their backs, the round, featureless heads swiveling from one side to another, scanning through some invisible means the ble
ak landscape of his moon-world. The aliens stopped before the broken bodies that littered the battlefield, pausing before human and alien remains, while the young man crouched in the shadow of an outbuilding, trying not to breathe. Through his memories the Eavesdropper saw the long vertical gash on the abdomen of each alien: the lipless mouth open wide into a horrific darkness, the delicacy with which the prehensile edges of the orifice gathered in each body like an embrace and closed around it. She felt the young man’s horror, his anger, going through her like a cold knife.

  But sometimes he dreamed of a green and primitive place on a distant planet. His childhood: running in a long, green meadow with patches of bare earth and wild tussocks of grass that would make him stumble so that suddenly he would be looking between grass-shoots into an ant’s world. And the washer with its arms aloft, swift-walking through the grass, back and forth, making the wash billow out in the constant wind …. The mother was holding a woven-reed tray full of yeri grains, shaking it so the tiny winged grains flew up and caught the currents, streaming out in skeins of spotted gold, up the hill to the tanglewood, where the fine nets of the trees would catch them and they would sprout many months later. She did this just for him, not because she needed to; the seed-blower had done most of the job already, up high. He watched her brown arms, strong and rhythmic, and the seeds rippling out in wide ribbons, and laughed in delight. She smiled at him. Lying with his face against the ground, the boy saw her as a great tree, her bare, callused toes peering from between the folds of the blue sari like roots that would hold them all to the earth, her head up in the clouds, long black hair turning to gray, loosening from the bun at the back of her neck so that the tendrils were fanned by the breeze ….

  But what struck the Eavesdropper about this man, this boy, was the way he felt about his mother: she was the bedrock of his world. At these times she felt the shock of familiarity: that she had once been the recipient of such an uncomplicated love. But her memories were unreliable; she recalled things that she had apparently experienced or done that seemed distant, unfamiliar, shocking. She knew for instance that she had herself spent a long time with the enemy aliens, but the knowledge of precisely what had happened—the capture, the incarceration of the humans, including herself, their journey through space in the alien ship in cold sleep, the attack or explosion that had blown the little life-pod away into space on some random trajectory—the details were blurred in her mind, her personal memory contaminated by those of the others. Whatever she remembered came to her in flashes or glimpses: pungent, warren-like passageways, blind gropings in the heat of a room, the press of terrified bodies, the great silhouette of the alien in the doorway, its mind reaching out to her mind, calming it, telling her what to do (what was it she had been told with such urgency?) and she remembered also sweet hunger, and nutrients snaking out into her in thin, aromatic streams, and the mourning and celebrating of a death ….