by Watts, Peter
Something about that made Anya want to laugh—although there was nothing funny about it.
~
“Do I look younger?” Anya’s mum asked. “Do I sound younger?” There were only two injections left from the last box. Anya had heard they were worth hundreds of pounds each—maybe even thousands by now.
“Hmm?” The adverts never claimed to make you younger, only to keep you from aging so quickly.
They’re being modest, Anya’s mum had told her. I’m five years younger by now at least. Soon I’ll be as young as you!
Only two injections left. And after that…
“They’ll start selling them again I reckon. Soon,” Anya’s mum kept telling her. “There’s a market for them. They’ll sell them again.”
~
A single treatment would have cost them two thousand pounds—and Anya’s mum would have paid it if Anya’s father hadn’t stopped her.
“What’re we going to do?” she kept asking, over and over, until Anya would have done anything to shut her up. “What are we going to do?” As if this was Anya’s problem too.
She looked up eotaxin online just to make her stop asking.
“It says here it comes from a gene on chromasome eleven,” she told her mother.
“Where’s that? Can we cut it out?”
“No, Mum.” Anya sighed.
“How do we get rid of it?”
Anya laughed. “You’d need to get rid of your blood, Mum. That’s where it is—in your blood.”
“How do we do that then?” It had taken Anya a moment to realise she was serious.
~
As far as Anya could tell, there were two ways to stop the effects of eotaxin—and neither of them seemed like a good idea.
“It must be there for a reason, Mum.”
“Yeah—to make me old. Older. Huh!”
“No, but listen—”
“Just—find a way to get rid of it,” her mum snapped.
The Anti-tax had been an inhibitor. A blocker. It bound itself to the eotaxins and stopped them from working. When you stopped using them, the eotaxin would start back up where it left off.
The only way to get rid of it was a plasma transfusion.
“You’d need to get plasma from someone young. Some way of getting it out of them and into you. Um, it just isn’t practical.”
“If you loved me, you’d find a way.” She sniffed dramatically. Over-dramatically.
“Mum…”
Anya‘s mum folded her arms. “If you loved me, you’d find a way.”
~
There were plasma clinics now, for those who could afford it. If you took in a donor, it was cheaper.
“Come with me,” Anya’s mum said. “Just for moral support.”
You had to go private to get it—the National Health Service considered it a ‘cosmetic procedure‘.
Immortality at a price! The headlines said. How much will you pay?
Too much, Anya thought. Far more than they could afford.
~
Nobody really knew—or cared—when the first girls went missing. Most of them were prostitutes or illegals. All of them were under twenty five.
If the papers reported it, it was as an afterthought.
“Anya, if you loved me…”
“No. I’m not -”
“See this? See this here? That’s another wrinkle. I’m getting old, Anya. I’m dying. And—and you could stop it. But you won’t, will you? You’ve got your youth, haven’t you? You’ve got it and you don’t want to share!”
She didn’t ask when Anya’s father was there anymore. He had lost his temper with her weeks ago.
“Stop it, Hayley! Stop it! Just… stop it. Why should she have to do it?”
“I don’t want to die!” I don’t—”
“You’re a grown woman, Hayley. Behave like it.” He picked up his newspaper and opened it at random.
“I’ll pay you, if you like,” Anya’s mum told her. “I’ll pay you… I don’t know, how much do you want? It’ll grow back, won’t it? You’ll get more—plenty enough to share with your mum.”
The leaflets said that you could donate plasma twice a week. Anya’s mum had brought them home with her one evening and scattered them around the house. The leaflets said it wouldn’t hurt. That it wouldn’t do any lasting damage to the donor and there was no risk involved.
Anya’s father had collected up the leaflets and put them outside with the rubbish. No one mentioned them again.
~
There was an article in the paper about a man who killed his nephew.
“I needed the plasma,” he was supposed to have said. He had collected up as much blood as he could and taken it to one of the private donation stations.
“It was all over his arms,” the witnesses said. “All over his face.”
Anya dreamed that her mother did the same—that she would wake up one morning to find a knife pressed against her throat. She started looking for a flat of her own and locking her door at night.
“Anya, I want to talk to you.” Her mum’s voice was muffled through the thickness of the door. “Anya, unlock the door please.”
When she knocked—hard and then softly when her fists started to hurt—Anya cried. The dreams stopped. The knocking meant she didn’t sleep.
The abductions were making the headlines by then. A few young men but mostly women. Pretty girls—maybe people thought they could transfuse good looks. A few bodies turned up, but not many. The papers speculated—‘plasma farms’ was the most popular theory—but there was little to no evidence.
“Anya, I’m your mother! Doesn’t that mean anything to you? I brought you into this world…”
When Anya moved out, her father helped her pack.
“Take care of yourself, love,” he told her.
“Tell Mum—”
Her father sighed. “I’ll tell her.”
~
It was four weeks—just under a month—before she visited them. Unpacking seemed to take her forever.
“In here, Anya!” her mother called. She was smiling—Anya couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother smile like that.
“What do you think?” Her mum twirled.
New hair? New dress? Anya couldn’t tell. She wasn’t sure.
“Very nice,” she said. “Where’s Dad?”
“No more wrinkles. Can you tell?”
“That’s—” There were two glasses in the sink, both of them stained red. The kitchen smelled like copper and rot. Like rotten meat.
“Dad?”
“He sent his love, Anya. He had to—”
“Dad? Dad! Mum, what did—?”
“If you’d bloody cared I wouldn’t have had to—” her mum snapped. “Only five years younger, but I took it all. I figure that’ll make a difference. Don’t you?”
Two glasses in the sink—the price of immortality, one pint at a time.
“Will it work? Do you think that it will?”
If it did, the price was too high.
One pint at a time, Anya’s youth drained away.
Rebecca L. Brown is a writer, model and businesswoman. She takes her coffee very seriously.
THE SOULS OF STARS
Amelia Mangan
There was a girl with a bruised arm on Earth, and that was why I had to leave.
I saw her through the limousine window. Standing at the lights. Waiting to cross. She was leaning on the post and adjusting the strap of her bag and there was a bruise on her arm, dark and blotchy and big. It was purple in the centre, a dark angry purple, paling to red, until there was nothing left but a thin sick aura of yellow. Her skin was so pale the bruise seemed obscene, an insult to her flesh.
The car moved on and my gown fell between my thighs. I pulled off my glove and started to rub my arm, right where her bruise had been. I kept rubbing and rubbing until the car stopped and I was told the party was here. By then my wrist ached and my skin had begun to burn. I smiled and th
anked the driver, but the bruise was still there, lodged in my brain. I kept thinking about blood under the skin, about internal bleeding, about how that sort of thing could never be treated, that wound never dressed; all it could do was bleed and bleed and bleed inside her, and spread, and grow fat, until she was nothing but blood, nothing but a swollen mass of blood bound in thin, pale skin.
I entered the party and had my picture taken, but people weren't looking at me. They were crowded in the middle of the room, gasping and sighing and asking questions I didn't understand. Does it bite? Can I touch it? It's so beautiful.
I pushed ahead and looked down. Someone had brought a dragon to the party.
It crawled on thick fat legs and flicked its tongue and hissed. Its tongue was purple. Paling to red. Muscles coiled under thick, scaled hide. Diamonds encircled its neck.
“What is that?” I said, to no one. “What is it?”
“A Komodo dragon,” someone said, probably its owner. He looked very proud. “Largest lizard in the world.”
My stomach knotted. “In the world.”
“Uh huh. You can touch him if you like.”
“No,” I said, very fast. “No.”
“It's safe. They only eat rats, rabbits. Small things.”
The dragon looked at me. Its eyes were black and dull, heavy with hunger.
I should touch it, I thought. People were looking at me, expecting it of me. My glove was off. I'd left it in the car. Why had I left it in the car? People were waiting for me to touch the dragon.
I put my hand out. The gloved one.
“You wouldn't want it to bite you, though,” the owner went on. “Their mouths, you see. Almost a hundred different kinds of bacteria in there.”
I snatched my hand back. Stared at the dragon. It stared back.
“It's not the bite that kills you,” said the owner. “Not the bite itself. But the germs. Those germs would kill you stone dead. Right where you stand.”
I smiled and excused myself and ran to the bathroom and puked until I was empty.
~
After that it was impossible to think without thinking of them. The girl and the dragon. The arm and the mouth. The bruise and the germs.
Everything was dark, and everything was dirty. Dark like the bruise; dirty like germs. I couldn't look at anyone without seeing one or the other. All the world was blood, and all the world was sick. There was nothing else.
I tried. I went out with friends. I went to more parties. I had more pictures taken. I smiled harder. But as soon as I got home I'd leap into the shower and scrub and scrub and scrub until the skin flaked, until it came away from the flesh. Snakes slough their skin. This, I told myself, was natural.
I took meds. A few at first, mild ones. Then more, and not so mild. I stopped taking calls and locked myself away. The apartment was air-conditioned, climate-controlled. All the flowers were under glass. Nothing could hurt me there. I made sure there was no dust, no dirt.
I am going to hurt myself, I kept thinking. Or: I am going to hurt other people.
I started saying a lot of prayers. I am not religious, but it calmed me to say the words. Every time the panic rose, I chanted, like a witch: God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, the wisdom to know the difference. After a while the words stopped meaning anything.
The calls stopped too. Things grew quiet. I began to wonder if this would be the way my life would end. If I would die soon. The thought was a comfort.
I watched a lot of news reports. Most of them confirmed what I knew, about the world, the people in it, all the blood and all the sickness. But one of them was different. One of them felt like something. Felt real.
It wasn't very long. Only a couple of minutes. One of those human-interest things, an oddity, something to make people laugh. I didn't laugh. I rewound it and watched it again, and again, and again.
They called it “the McCaul Ghost Ship”. Created and fired up into space by eccentric billionaire RJ McCaul thirty years ago. Shots of the ship: huge, massive, leviathan. A giant twisted on his back, drowned in a black bath.
Shots of RJ McCaul. Young, handsome. Nervous blue eyes. Planed cheekbones. Swan neck. No one ever understood, the announcer said, exactly why he made the ship; he refused to explain. Some said it was guilt, over the people his family's munitions company had killed in the last war. Some said he'd gone mad. Whatever that means. Either way, he fired the ship deep into space, with himself inside, and was never heard from again. They'd tried to find him. But the ship wasn't designed for anyone in it to be found. McCaul had followed plans (shots of scattered blueprint, scrawled graying ink) that no one understood; plans that corresponded to no dimensions save those inside his head. Corridors led nowhere. Staircases looped back on themselves. Rooms tapered into forever, or ended at the doorway.
McCaul was dead. Had to be. He was never found, and no one could live like that. Suspended in nothingness. Lost in floating steel.
The ship could not be brought down. Not legally. It had drifted outside Earth's jurisdiction, into unregulated space. The area was a minefield of black holes. Far too dangerous to venture out there, to try and recover the Ghost Ship. It might, the announcer said, hang there forever. High above the world. High above everyone and everything. Empty and vast and silent.
I called my father. I asked him to buy the ship for me. He did it. He did it because he owes me.
Seventeen and a half minutes after I saw the news report, the McCaul Ghost Ship was the property of Yoshida Salvage Inc. Nineteen minutes after that, it was the property of Angela Yoshida. It was mine.
Leaving Earth was not a sacrifice. I took very little. Food would be sent to me each week. The ship’s lights and water still worked. The only clothes I needed were the ones that I wore. I could be naked, for all it mattered. No one would—no one will—ever see me again.
~
I am lying on my back in the middle of the floor. My ear is pressed to the steel. The McCaul Ghost Ship hums with silence. Floor upon floor of no sound, no song, no words; nothing loud and nothing soft. Silence stacked on silence. Outside is space, cold and dark and forever. Nothing lives but me. Nothing breathes but me. No heart beats but mine.
I take a breath and hold the generated air in my lungs until they start to ache. I breathe out softly and listen to my breath as it gusts through the ship, waltzes down tubes and conduits, slithers through metal cracks and echo-chamber vents.
This, I think, is how it was always meant to be. Just me. Alone. Only my heart for company. Only my heart, and my breath, and my mind.
I wander the ship. I follow its twists and its turns, expecting nothing. I follow one corridor to its end; it tightens around me as I walk, growing smaller and smaller, tapering to a vanishing point, until I am jammed eye-to-eye with a miniscule door. I open the door and peer inside. A tiny room, unfurnished, except for an even tinier rocking horse. The horse grins, mindless, wooden teeth brown and peeling.
I climb a staircase and find myself staring at a ladder. I climb the ladder and find myself staring down an empty elevator shaft, sheering into solid blackness. A twisted velvet rope hangs above the shaft. I climb down the rope and find myself standing once more at the foot of the stairs.
I open a hatch on the ground and inside there is a spiral, cast in pearlescent white, the inside of a conch shell. The spiral curls down and down and I try to follow it but it's impossible. I pluck a coin from my pocket and toss it in. It dances on its rim, looping the spiral, tinkling like a bell. It grows smaller and smaller and vanishes and I listen for the sound of it landing somewhere, but the sound never comes.
I pass the days this way. Or I pass hours this way, or minutes, or weeks, or months. I didn't take a watch. I have no idea how long I've been here. Time gets caught in the cracks here, loses itself in the geometries that make no sense, in the rooms that vanish, in the halls that stutter and trail away like forgotten words. I am no longer tangled in my own m
ind; I am tangled in someone else's.
It doesn't feel too bad.
~
I don't dream these days, which is how I know I'm not dreaming the sound that wakes me up. I sit up and listen. There shouldn't be any sound. There shouldn't be anything at all.
I breathe and swallow and breathe. My heart thuds, dull and slow, but getting faster.
Godgrantmetheserenity, I begin, toacceptthethingsIcannot...
There. There, again.
Difficult to describe. A hollow thoom, someplace unidentifiable. This ship is uncharted territory, terra nullius. Perhaps some faulty machinery? The ship is old. Never undergone maintenance, as far as I know.
My heart is speeding now. My meds are in the bathroom, and I wish to God I had them with me now. They’d slow things down, blunt the edges. Might be helpful.
I twist my hands against each other and think about blood under flesh. If I look down, I can see the cells through my skin, swirling and churning, waiting to break free.
I can't keep thinking about this. I won't. So I get up. Godgrantme. Theserenity. Toaccept. Thethings.
I open the door and walk out into the corridor. My feet slap metal. I would like to stop twisting my hands but they seem to be twisting themselves.
I slept in my clothes. I am glad of this. I wouldn't like to be naked now.
Senseless configurations of iron and steel. Broken shadows all around.
Thoom.
It's closer. Or I am closer. I don't even remember moving.
I open a door, and behind the door there is a wall, and on the wall there is a hatch. So many hatches on this ship. This one is huge, the metal heavy with rust. The size of a person. A lever beside it.
I put my hand out. I should have worn gloves.
I pull the lever. A snake-hiss; decompression.
Behind the hatch, there is a tube, and inside the tube there is a body. The body falls out and hits the floor.
