In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

by Hank Davis

  Feeling distinctly worried now, Armstrong made great effort to pull himself together. He would try to be rational again; he would think of business, the work he had done at the camp—anything but this infernal place. For a while he succeeded quite well. But presently, with a maddening persistence, every train of thought came back to the same point. He could not get out of his mind the picture of that inexplicable rock and its appalling possibilities. Over and over again he found himself wondering how far away it was, whether he had already passed it, and whether it was on his right or his left.

  The ground was quite flat again, and the road drove on straight as an arrow. There was one gleam of consolation: Port Sanderson could not be much more than two miles away. Armstrong had no idea how long he had been on the road. Unfortunately his watch was not illuminated and he could only guess at the passage of time. With any luck, the Canopus should not take off for another two hours at least. But he could not be sure, and now another fear began to enter his mind—the dread that he might see a vast constellation of lights rising swiftly into the sky ahead, and know that all this agony of mind had been in vain.

  He was not zigzagging so badly now, and seemed to be able to anticipate the edge of the road before stumbling off it. It was probable, he cheered himself by thinking, that he was traveling almost as fast as if he had a light. If all went well, he might be nearing Port Sanderson in thirty minutes—a ridiculously small space of time. How he would laugh at his fears when he strolled into his already reserved stateroom in the “Canopus,” and felt that peculiar quiver as the phantom drive hurled the great ship far out of this system, back to the clustered star-clouds near the center of the Galaxy—back toward Earth itself, which he had not seen for so many years. One day, he told himself, he really must visit Earth again. All his life he had been making the promise, but always there had been the same answer—lack of time. Strange, wasn’t it, that such a tiny planet should have played so enormous a part in the development of the Universe, should even have come to dominate worlds far wiser and more intelligent than itself!

  Armstrong’s thoughts were harmless again, and he felt calmer. The knowledge that he was nearing Port Sanderson was immensely reassuring, and he deliberately kept his mind on familiar, unimportant matters. Carver’s Pass was already far behind, and with it that thing he no longer intended to recall. One day, if he ever returned to this world, he would visit the pass in the daytime and laugh at his fears. In twenty minutes now, they would have joined the nightmares of his childhood.

  It was almost a shock, though one of the most pleasant he had ever known, when he saw the lights of Port Sanderson come up over the horizon. The curvature of this little world was very deceptive: it did not seem right that a planet with a gravity almost as great as Earth’s should have a horizon so close at hand. One day, someone would have to discover what lay at this world’s core to give it so great a density. Perhaps the many tunnels would help—it was an unfortunate turn of thought, but the nearness of his goal had robbed it of terror now. Indeed, the thought that he might really be in danger seemed to give his adventure a certain piquancy and heightened interest. Nothing could happen to hims now, with ten minutes to go and the lights of the Port already in sight.

  A few minutes later, his feelings changed abruptly when he came to the sudden bend in the road. He had forgotten the chasm that caused his detour, and added half a mile to the journey. Well, what of it? He thought stubbornly. An extra half-mile would make no difference now—another ten minutes, at the most.

  It was very disappointing when the lights of the city vanished. Armstrong had not remembered the hill which the road was skirting, perhaps it was only a low ridge, scarcely noticeable in the daytime. But by hiding the lights of the port it had taken away his chief talisman and left him again at the mercy of his fears.

  Very unreasonably, his intelligence told him, he began to think how horrible it would be if anything happened now, so near the end of the journey. He kept the worst of his fears at bay for a while, hoping desperately that the lights of the city would soon reappear. But as the minutes dragged on, he realized that the ridge must be longer than he imagined. He tried to cheer himself by the thought that the city would be all the nearer when he saw it again, but somehow logic seemed to have failed him now. For presently he found himself doing something he had not stooped to, even out in the waste by Carver’s Pass.

  He stopped, turned slowly round, and with bated breath listened until his lungs were nearly bursting.

  The silence was uncanny, considering how near he must be to the Port. There was certainly no sound from behind him. Of course there wouldn’t be, he told himself angrily. But he was immensely relieved. The thought of that faint and insistent clicking had been haunting him for the last hour.

  So friendly and familiar was the noise that did reach him at last that the anticlimax almost made him laugh aloud. Drifting through the still air from a source clearly not more than a mile away came the sound of a landing-field tractor, perhaps one of the machines loading the Canopus itself. In a matter of seconds, thought Armstrong, he would be around this ridge with the Port only a few hundred yards ahead. The journey was nearly ended. In a few moments, this evil plain would be no more than a fading nightmare.

  It seemed terribly unfair: so little time, such a small fraction of a human life, was all he needed now. But the gods have always been unfair to man, and now there were enjoying their little jest. For there could be no mistaking the rattle of monstrous claws in the darkness ahead of him.

  Tony Daniel

  Here’s a tale with a number of twists, with an alien who didn’t think she was evil or malevolent, though her preteen prisoner had a different take on the matter. And maybe the alien shouldn’t have assumed that kidnapping an adolescent girl was the best and easiest way to bring a specimen back to her home system. Too bad the alien wasn’t familiar with human fairytales, and what happened to evil stepmothers in them . . .

  Tony Daniel is the author of five science fiction books, the latest of which is Guardian of Night, as well as an award-winning short story collection, the Robot’s Twilight Companion. He also collaborated with David Drake on the novel The Heretic, and its forthcoming sequel, The Savior, new novels in the popular military science fiction series, The General. His story “Life on the Moon,” was a Hugo finalist and also won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award. Daniel’s short fiction has been much anthologized and has been collected in multiple year’s best anthologies. Daniel has also co-written screen plays for SyFy Channel horror movies, and during the early 2000s was the writer and director of numerous audio dramas for critically-acclaimed SCIFICOM’s Seeing Ear theater. Born in Alabama, Daniel has lived in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Seattle, Prague, and New York City. He is now an editor at Baen Books and lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina with his wife and two children.

  FROG WATER

  Tony Daniel

  The ship soothed my legs with the slop wands. Aleria had ordered it to do so. She thought I was upset about the blisters on my thighs and shins, but the truth was that I was used to those now. I let her keep thinking that was what it was, though. This was something I’d learned to do back home, even though maybe I didn’t know I’d learned it at the time: you know, act like something bad that happened is much worse than it actually is until you can figure out your next move.

  The wands were wet and gooey. I was holding onto a wall strap and stuck my legs out floating in front of me so the ship could get to them easily. Living in the ship was like living inside a kind of cave, only the stalactites and stalagmites could grow out of the ship wall instantly, and they could be long and thin, or thick and bumpy. They would also be hollow, like a hose. They delivered all kinds of stuff, from fluid to the goo on the slop wands, to the gray stuff I sucked out of one of them that Aleria called food. It must be something close, because it had kept me alive and kicking for over a year.

  Anyway, the slop wands were a little different. They were more like sea anemo
nes with swirling little tentaclely brushes. They were coated with this combination of nutrient and lubricating solution for the mechs in my skin.

  The goo was kind of rancid to tell the truth. It smelled like that time Dustin found the frog eggs when he was playing at the creek by my old house, and he brought this big mass of eggs home and put them in a bottle of water—one of those plastic bottles that used to be at the grocery stores and they came in a case of twelve or twenty or however many and they were wrapped in that clear wrap like a little squeaky pod. We always got Something Springs Water, something like that. I’d forgotten the brand name. It wasn’t something I ever thought I’d want to remember, you know?

  I used to really like to poke my fingers in the plastic wrap of those cases, because it would give a lot without breaking and make these kind of dorky dimples that looked funny, before finally it would break. Da yelled at me for wasting my time doing it once.

  “But it feels good, Da,” I would say, and he would smile and say, “Yeah, sweetiepie, I guess it does, at that.” And we poked a couple in together.

  So Dustin leaves the frog eggs on that little side cart thing by the kitchen table and one day about a week later Mom comes in from gardening and she’s all thirsty and what does she do? She looks around, and sees a half-full water bottle and reaches for it and takes a swig.

  And there I am sitting at the table, eating some microwave shrimp dinner or something, and I’m in a hurry because I have to go to a soccer game.

  Mom turns to tell me probably to hurry up or we’ll be late.

  She realizes her mouth is full of water.

  Then she realizes what’s in that water.

  Spew!

  Week-old frog egg water all over the side of my face, in my hair, on my jersey sleeve, in the macaroni and shrimp. And there’s even some of it on the fork that’s just going into my mouth. Frog water—and into my mouth before I can stop it.

  Disgusting!

  I spit out the frog water shrimp and macaroni on the plate. Meanwhile, Mom runs over to the sink and gags, trying to throw up, but she can’t get herself to.

  And I, I remember, I went over there too, and I couldn’t help it, and I shouldn’t have done what I did next, because I was just as grossed out as she was, but I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

  And she turned and looked at me so hurt, that I would laugh at her at a time like that. She didn’t say anything, but I’ll never forget that look she gave me.

  And I felt really bad and started to cry, “Sorry, Mommy. Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Because I still called her that sometimes back then, “Mommy.”

  And then Mom smiled. Everything was all right.

  Except that she went ahead and threw up right then and there into the sink, of course. After all, she’d drunk a huge swallow of frog egg water.

  I was ten at the time. It was not long before that night with the glowing light, and the bad dream, and the next thing I know I woke up in the crèche, and then there was Aleria hunched over me, staring at me with those eye stalks of hers.

  But back to the frog water: the smell of it hit us both. It was on me, and it was rancid. And we both started to gag and laugh, and Mom helped me clean up real quick, and she brushed her teeth and gargled with some old mouthwash she found under the bathroom cabinet, Tangerine or Listerane or something, I can’t remember, and we made it to the soccer game just in time. But I had to keep the same jersey on since I only had the one, and I smelled that gag-me frog water smell the whole time and it made me so mad I scored a goal and took another girl out with a slide tackle when I was on defense and got yellow-carded and almost thrown out. Anyway, we won that time, and all the other girls jumped on me, and high-fived me for playing so good. And I forgot all about the frog water after that. Until now.

  The slop wand goo had been in storage probably for years, and, like everything else on Aleria’s ship, was kind of stale smelling or tasting.

  I dried myself off with a towel that came out of another maker-bump from the ship wall. You have to dry yourself off in zero g. Any liquid that’s water-based will stick to you like a layer of paste or cooking oil or something, and it won’t just run off, because there’s no “down” for it to run toward. I gave the wet towel to a disposal tube, which sucked it down.

  “Space or recycle?” asked the ship.

  “Recycle,” I answered.

  There wasn’t any reason to throw the thing away, even though interstellar space was pretty empty and could use maybe a towel floating out there between stars to give it some character.

  After Aleria had detached herself from my legs, she slid over to her resting globe. It was kind of like a chair for Aleria, and it floated in the exact middle of the bridge pod. It was held in place by magnets or some kind of forcefield thing like that, because if you tried to move the globe from the center, it would pop back into position. It had an opening on one side, so Aleria, who didn’t have any skeleton or exoskeleton at all, could slide into there like a, say, one of those sea slugs from the Science Channel, and bunch up in a ball. This was relaxing to Aleria’s type, the Meebs. I’d never met any others, but she’d had me watch plenty of videos.

  “You’ll be meeting them soon, after all,” she said. “Your new brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. By the time we arrive, you’ll really be looking forward to it.”

  So there she sat in the middle of the bridge pod. This was what I called the room, anyway. It was oval shaped, like an egg. There wasn’t really any floor or ceiling, just a wall, because this was zero g. The resting globe was clear and it looked like one of those terrariums I used to see in Pet Mart or whatever that place was called. I guess the globe ones were supposed to look cool. They sat on a stand and you put turtles or frogs or whatever air breathing stuff in them. Dustin and I only ever had gold fish.

  Thinking about Dustin made me whimper a little. I guess it was pretty loud. I didn’t cry anymore, but I couldn’t help sometimes letting out something like that. I hated it when I did. I hated to let Aleria know anything about how I was really feeling. She was going to own my thoughts and feelings pretty soon, and I wanted to keep them for myself as long as I could before that happened.

  “Honey, won’t you tell me what’s the matter?” said the voice from the ship’s speakers. This was Aleria talking. The regular ship voice was just a voice, maybe a woman, maybe a man. Gray, like everything else here. But Aleria’s voice was all honey-sweet. She kind of sounded like when Da would do the helium breath voice at my and Dustin’s birthday parties, but full of “oohs,” and “aahs,” and “dears” and “darlings.”

  She didn’t have a real voice, of course. She was a blob, not a human. She talked to the ship the way her kind did—through chemical packets that she kind of flicked at the walls, where they were absorbed. I thought of them as booger-filled snot. The ship then translated the packets and spoke in the made-up voice it had for her.

  “The nodes are hurting me inside,” I said. Which was true. The implants, which she’d put into me, were growing inside my muscles and would one day take over all of me, did hurt. This was an always and forever ache, and I didn’t let it affect me anymore. But it was a good excuse.

  “I’m sorry, Megan, but one day the pain will be gone, I promise.”

  “And I’ll be like you.”

  “You’ll be part of me,” Aleria said. “I’ll hug you really tight, and we’ll be together forever.”

  You’re not my mother, I thought. My mother is ten thousand light-years behind me.

  I didn’t really care about what the change was doing to my body that much. Oh, I did a little. But one day my thoughts were not going to be my own. That was what I really hated, hated, hated.

  One day, all my memories of Mom, Da, Dustin and the rest would belong to Aleria. And I knew what she’d do with them, all right. She was jealous. She would keep the knowledge, but wipe the love away. She wanted me all for herself.

  “Darling, you’re so sweet, I need another sip of you,” Aleria sa
id through the ship speaker. “Bring the conditioner over and bathe me, there’s a good girl.”

  The ship wall made a faucet. That was the only way I could think to describe it. You squeezed the outside of the faucet like maybe you would milk a cow—even though I never milked a cow in my life, we lived in the suburbs—and this kind of gloppy sausage filling stuff would come out. It was some kind of enzyme that softened up Aleria’s membrane artificially so she could feed again without having to wait her normal period, which could be a couple of hours. I caught the glop in a balloon bag, then pinched the balloon closed, and slid the end from the faucet. There was another maker-cone thingie nearby, more or less permanent, for water. I put the lip of the balloon over this one and squeezed out some water to mix with the enzyme-glop inside the balloon.

  When I took the balloon off the water maker-cone, a few drops of water escaped. Water drops didn’t just float off into space like you might think. They were still touching my hand, and water has this weird surface tension. In zero g it will stick to you. I remember when we had toast for breakfast and I would get some strawberry jelly on my hands and you couldn’t wipe it off with a napkin and even if you licked your fingers—gross!—that jelly-slimy feeling would still be there until you gave your hands a good washing.

  Water does that in zero g. A thin coat will stick to you no matter how hard you shake your hand or whatever to get it off. The only way to get rid of it is to find something absorbent and let that soak it up. I wiped these water drops on the side of my pants. I wear these kind of gray pajama top and bottoms made out of some kind of thin material. I don’t know what they’re made of, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t one hundred percent cotton. They fit me okay, but I’ve been growing a lot lately and my wrists and ankles are starting to stick way out.