by Mindy Klasky
All the companions squealed and gnashed their teeth, ready to defend themselves, as aware of danger as they were of opportunity.
“Why are you doing this?” Yalnis cried. “I’m not your enemy!”
“I want my ship! I want Seyyan!”
“It’s gone! She’s gone!” Yalnis wrestled Ekarete and grabbed her, holding tight and ducking her head as Ekarete slapped and struck her. The companions writhed and lunged at their opponent. Their movements gave Yalnis weird sensations of sexual arousal and pleasure in the midst of anger and fear.
The floor slipped beneath her, startling her as it built loose lobes of ship silk. She grabbed one and flung herself forward, pulling the gossamer fabric over Ekarete, letting go, rolling free, leaving Ekarete trapped. The silk closed in. Yalnis struggled to her feet, brushing her hand across her stomach to reassure herself that her companions and her daughter remained uninjured. She wiped sweat from her face and realized it was not sweat, but blood, not Ekarete’s but her own, flowing from a stinging scratch down her cheek.
Both she and her ship had been distracted. Seyyan’s craft struggled against a thin spot that should have been covered by more silver silk from Yalnis’s ship. The tangled shape rippled and roiled and the craft bulged to tear at the restraint. Glowing plasma from the propulsion system spurted in tiny jets beneath the surface of the silk. The craft convulsed. Yalnis flinched, to think of the searing plasma trapped between the craft’s skin and the imprisoning cover.
“Finish it,” Yalnis said to her ship. “Please, finish it.” Tears ran hot down her face. Ekarete’s muffled cries and curses filled the living space, and Yalnis’s knees shook.
“True,” her ship said. A cloak of silver spread to cover the weak spot, to seal in the plasma.
The roiling abruptly stopped.
Yalnis’s friends flung coat after coat of imprisoning silk over Seyyan’s craft until they were all exhausted.
When it was over, Yalnis’s ship accelerated away with the last of its strength. Her friends began a slow dispersal, anxious to end the gathering. Seyyan’s craft drifted alone and silent, turning in a slow rotation, its glimmer extinguished by a patchwork of hardening colors.
Yalnis wondered how much damage the plasma had done, how badly Seyyan’s craft had been hurt, and whether it and Seyyan had survived.
“Tasmin,” she said, quietly, privately, “will you come for Ekarete? She can’t be content here.”
Ekarete was a refugee, stripped of all her possessions, indigent and pitiable, squeaking angrily beneath ship silk like a completely hidden companion.
After a hesitation Yalnis could hardly believe, or forgive, Tasmin replied.
“Very well.”
Yalnis saw to her ship. Severely depleted, it arced through space in a stable enough orbit. It had expended its energy and drawn on its structural mass. Between defending itself and the demands of its unborn daughter ship, it would need a long period of recovery.
She sent one more message, a broadcast to everyone, but intended for Seyyan’s former friends.
“I haven’t the resources to correct her orbit.” She felt too tired even to check its stability, and reluctant to ask her ship to exert itself. “Someone who still cares for her must take that responsibility.”
“Let me up!” Ekarete shouted. Yalnis gave her a moment of attention.
“Tasmin will be here soon,” Yalnis said. “She’ll help you.”
“We’re bleeding.”
Yalnis said, “I don’t care.”
She pulled her shirt aside to see to her own companions. Three of the four had retracted, showing only their teeth. She stroked around them till they relaxed, dozed, and exposed the tops of their downy little heads, gold and copper and softly freckled. Only Bahadirgul, ebony against Yalnis’s pale skin, remained bravely awake and alert.
Drying blood slashed its mouth, but the companion itself had sustained only a shallow scratch. Yalnis petted the soft black fur of Bahadirgul’s hair.
“You’re gallant,” Yalnis said. “Yes, gallant. I made the right choice, didn’t I?” Bahadirgul trembled with pleasure against her fingers, within her body.
When Bahadirgul slept, exhausted and content, Yalnis saw to her daughter, who grew unmolested and unconcerned; she saw to herself and to her companions, icing the bruises of Ekarete’s attack, washing her scratches and the companion’s. She looked in the mirror and wondered if she would have a scar down her cheek, across her perfect skin.
And, if I do, will I keep it? she wondered. As a reminder?
As Yalnis bathed and put on new clothes, Tasmin’s ship approached, sent greetings, asked for permission to attach. Yalnis let her ship make that decision, and felt relieved when the ship approved. A pilus extended from Tasmin’s ship; Yalnis’s ship accepted it. Perhaps it carried some risk, but they were sufficiently exhausted that growing a capsule for Ekarete’s transport felt beyond their resources.
As the pilus widened into a passage, Zorar whispered to her through a message port, “Shall I come and help? I think I should.”
“No, my friend,” Yalnis whispered in reply. “Thank you, but no.”
Tasmin entered, as elegant and perfect as ever. Yalnis surprised herself by taking contrary pride in her own casual appearance. Zorar’s concern and worry reached her. Yalnis should be afraid, but she was not.
“Please release Ekarete,” she said to her ship.
“True,” it said, its voice soft. The net of silk withdrew, resorbed. As soon as one hand came free, Ekarete clutched and scratched and dragged herself loose. She sprang to her feet, blood-smeared and tangle-haired.
She took one step toward Yalnis, then stopped, staring over Yalnis’s shoulder.
Yalnis glanced quickly back.
As if deliberately framed, Seyyan’s craft loomed beyond the transparent dome of the living space, bound in multi-colored layers of the heaviest ship silk, each layer permeated with allergens particular to the ship that had created it. Seyyan’s craft lay cramped within the sphere, shrinking from its painful touch, immobilized and put away until time wore the restraints to dust.
Ekarete keened with grief. The wail filled Yalnis’s hearing and thickened the air.
Tasmin hurried to her, putting one arm around her shaking shoulders, covering her with a wing of her dress.
“Take her,” Yalnis said to Tasmin. “Please, take her.”
Tasmin turned Ekarete and guided her to the pilus. The connection’s rim had already begun to swell inward, as Yalnis’s ship reacted to the touch of Tasmin’s with inflammation. Tasmin and Ekarete hurried through, and disappeared.
Seyyan’s former friends would have to decide how to treat Ekarete. They might abandon her, adopt her, or spawn a new craft for her. Yalnis had no idea what they would choose to do, whether they would decide she was pure fool for her loyalty, or pure hero for the same reason.
When the connector had healed over, leaving the wall a little swollen and irritated, when Tasmin’s ship moved safely away, Yalnis took a long deep breath and let it out slowly. Silence and solitude calmed her.
“It’s time, I think,” she said aloud.
“True,” replied her ship.
Yalnis descended to the growing chamber, where the daughter ship lay fat and sleek, bulging toward the outer skin. It had formed as a pocket of Yalnis’s ship, growing inward. A thick neck connected the two craft, but now the neck was thinning, with only an occasional pulse of nutrients and information. The neck would part, healing over on the daughter’s side, opening wide on the outer skin of Yalnis’s ship.
Yalnis stepped inside for the first, and perhaps the only, time.
The living space was very plain, very beautiful in its elegant simplicity, its walls and floor a black as deep and vibrant as space without stars. Its storage bulged with the unique gifts Yalnis’s guests had brought: new foods, new information, new bacteria, stories, songs, and maps of places unimaginably distant.
The soft silver skin of Yalnis’s ship
hugged it close, covering its transparent dome.
The new ship awoke to her presence. It created a nest for her. She cuddled into its alien warmth, and slept.
She woke to birth pangs, her own and her ship’s. Extensions and monitors retracted from her body.
“Time for launch,” she said to her ship.
“True,” it said, without hesitation or alternation. It shuddered with a powerful labor pang. It had recovered its strength, during the long rest.
“Bahadirgul,” Yalnis said, “it’s time.”
Bahadirgul yawned hugely, blinked, and came wide awake.
Yalnis and Bahadirgul combined again. The pleasure of their mental combining matched that of their physical combining, rose in intensity, and exceeded it. At the climax, they presented their daughter with a copy of Yalnis’s memories and the memories of her lover Bahadir.
A moment of pressure, a stab of pain—
Yalnis picked up the blinking gynuncula. Her daughter had Bahadir’s ebony skin, and hair of deepest brown, and Yalnis’s own dark blue eyes. Delighted, she showed her to Bahadirgul, wondering, as she always did, how much the companion understood beyond pleasure, satiation, and occasional fear or fury. It sighed and retreated to its usual position, face exposed, calm. The other companions hissed and blinked and looked away. Yalnis let the mesh of her shirt slip over their faces.
Yalnis carried her daughter through the new ship, from farm space to power plant, pausing to wash away the stickiness of birth in the pretty little bathing stream. The delicate fuzz on her head dried as soft as fur.
The daughter blinked at Yalnis. Everyone said a daughter always knew her mother from the beginning. Yalnis believed it, looking into the new being’s eyes, though neither she nor anyone she knew could recall that first moment of life and consciousness.
By the time she returned to the living space at the top of the new ship, the connecting neck had separated, one end healing against the daughter ship in a faint navel pucker, the other slowly opening to the outside. Yalnis’s ship shuddered again, pushing at the daughter ship. The transparent dome pressed out, to reveal space and the great surrounding web of stars.
Yalnis’s breasts ached. She sank cross-legged on the warm midnight floor and let her daughter suck, giving her a physical record of dangers and attractions as she and Bahadirgul had given her a mental record of the past.
“Karime,” Yalnis whispered, as her daughter fell asleep. Above them the opening widened and the older ship groaned and the new ship quaked, as it pressed out into the world.
“Karime, daughter, live well,” Yalnis said.
She gave her daughter to her ship’s daughter, placing the chubby sleeping creature in the soft nest. She petted the ship-silk surface.
“Take good care of her,” she said.
“True,” the new ship whispered.
Yalnis smiled, stood up, watched the new ship cuddle the new person for a moment, then hurried through the interior connection before it closed.
She slipped out, glanced back to be sure all was well, and returned to her living space to watch.
Yalnis’s ship gave one last heavy shudder. The new ship slipped free.
It floated nearby, getting its bearings, observing its surroundings. Soon—staying near another ship always carried an element of danger, as well as opportunity—it whispered into motion, accelerating itself carefully toward a higher, more distant orbit.
Yalnis smiled at its audacity. Farther from the star, moving through the star’s dust belt, it could collect mass and grow quickly. In a thousand, perhaps only half a thousand, orbits, Karime would emerge to take her place as a girl of her people.
“We could follow,” Yalnis said. “Rest, recoup…”
“False,” her ship whispered, displaying its strength, and its desire, and its need. “False, false.”
“We could go on our adventure.”
“True,” her ship replied, and turned outward toward the web of space, to travel forever, to feast on stardust.
Thank You
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About the Authors
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is the New York Times bestselling author of the Mer Cycle Trilogy and co-author of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (with Michael Reaves). Her short fiction has been published in Analog, Amazing Stories, Interzone, and Universe, with nominations for British SF, Nebula, Crawford Fantasy, and Sidewise awards.
Marie Brennan is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of several fantasy series, including the Memoirs of Lady Trent, the Onyx Court, the Wilders series, the Doppelganger duology, and the Varekai novellas, as well as nearly fifty short stories.
Amy Sterling Casil is a 2002 Nebula Award nominee and recipient of other awards and recognition for her short science fiction and fantasy. She is the author of 27 nonfiction books, over a hundred short stories, three fiction and poetry collections, and three novels. Amy is a founding member and treasurer of Book View Café and former treasurer of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. She is the founder of a new publishing company for the 21st century, Chameleon Publishing.
Brenda Clough writes novels, short stories, and nonfiction. She has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards. She lives in a cottage at the edge of a forest, and has been reading comic books for half a century.
Leah Cutter writes page-turning fiction in exotic locations, such as a magical New Orleans, the ancient Orient, Hungary, the Oregon coast, rural Kentucky, Seattle, Minneapolis, and many others. She writes literary, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and horror fiction. Her short fiction has been published in magazines like Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Talebones, anthologies like Fiction River, and on the web. Her long fiction has been published both by New York publishers as well as small presses.
Marissa Doyle originally intended to be an archaeologist but somehow got distracted, so instead she excavates tales of magic and history from the matrix of her imagination. Or something like that. She lives in New England with her family, her research library, and a bossy pet rabbit.
Doranna Durgin’s quirky spirit has led to an eclectic and extensive publishing journey across genres. Beyond that, she hangs around outside her Southwest mountain home with horse and dogs. She doesn't believe in mastering the beast within, but in channeling its power. For good or bad has yet to be decided...
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, a John W. Campbell nominee for her first book, writes literate, character-driven science fiction, fantasy & mystery. Known for The Chronicles of Nuala Series and the Night Calls Series, Katharine is a Texas author with Indiana and Michigan roots.
Mindy Klasky, a USA Today bestselling author, learned to read when her parents shoved a book in her hands and told her she could travel anywhere through stories. As a writer, Mindy has traveled through various genres, including science fiction, fantasy, and contemporary romance. In her spare time, Mindy knits, quilts, and tries to tame her to-be-read shelf.
Vonda N. McIntyre writes scien
ce fiction.
Nancy Jane Moore is a founding member of Book View Café. Her science fiction novel The Weave came out in 2015 from Aqueduct Press. Her books Ardent Forest, Changeling (first published by Aqueduct Press), Conscientious Inconsistencies (first published by PS Publishing), Walking Contradiction, and Flashes of Illumination are all available from the Book View Café bookstore. She lives in Oakland, California.
P.G. Nagle is the author of sixteen novels and two collections of short fiction, and co-editor of two anthologies. A native and lifelong resident of New Mexico, she has a special love of the outdoors, particularly New Mexico's wilds, where many of her stories are born.
Gillian Polack writes fiction that others have trouble defining. Her novels range from kinda-sorta urban fantasy in The Wizardry of Jewish Women (a Ditmar finalist) to kinda-sorta time travel but probably alternate history in Langue[dot]doc 1305. Alas for the world, she is addicted to chocolate, sarcasm and bad jokes. Fortunately, she lives in Canberra, Australia (where she teaches, edits, writes, and cooks), which is too far from most of the world for these things to matter.
Irene Radford started writing stories when she figured out what a pencil was for. A museum-trained historian, Irene was raised in a military family and grew up all over the US. Her interests range from ancient history, to spiritual meditations, to space stations, and a lot in between.
Deborah J. Ross is an award-nominated writer and editor of fantasy and science fiction. Recent novels include Thunderlord and The Children of Kings (with Marion Zimmer Bradley); Lambda Literary Award Finalist Collaborators (as Deborah Wheeler), and The Seven-Petaled Shield epic fantasy trilogy. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Star Wars: Tales from Jabba’s Palace, Realms of Fantasy, and Sword & Sorceress. She’s edited a number of anthologies, including the Lace and Blade series, Masques of Darkover, Mad Science Café, Beyond Grimm: Tales Newly Twisted, and Across the Spectrum. When she’s not writing, she knits for charity, plays classical piano, and studies yoga.
