Aetherbound

by E. K. Johnston

  “Hey, it’s okay.” Ned leaned over and awkwardly patted her on the shoulder. “I know rations are tight on a merchant ship, but we’re a bit more relaxed here. Dinner’s on us.”

  Pendt didn’t move, even though it was becoming clear that the boys were not going to start eating until she did.

  “You know exactly how many calories are on the table, don’t you?” Fisher said. He took a small plate and broke a piece of something white in half. “This is bread,” he told her. “You dip it in the oil like this.”

  It was the best thing Pendt had ever eaten. Tears sprang to her eyes, and for the first time in her life, she didn’t blink them away. The Harland was gone. She was going to fucking eat.

  “I’m almost afraid to tell you about cheese,” Ned said, watching her closely. “And we’re definitely going to have to ease you into sweets.”

  “Your ship wasn’t just rationed tightly,” Fisher said. “They starved you.”

  “They didn’t,” Pendt said around a mouthful. “They gave me enough to grow.”

  “But not enough to use the æther,” Fisher said.

  “Not safely, no,” Pendt said. “I did it a couple of times as a kid before I learned how to suppress it.”

  “How angry is your captain going to be?” Ned asked. He broke off a chunk of bread and chewed it lazily. “I get the feeling that your ship kind of . . . sucked.”

  “She’ll be furious,” Pendt said. “But she can’t justify the entire fuel supply to retrieve me. She has no way to recoup the loss. She might be back, but I don’t think it’ll be soon.”

  “What would have happened if you had stayed?” Fisher asked.

  “My birthday is next week,” Pendt said with a shrug. “Then I’d be old enough for a contract.”

  Ned swallowed and sat up straight. “Captain Arkady mentioned that they were on the way to meet up with a business contract,” he said. “In a month.”

  “That was me, then, I guess,” Pendt said. “Everyone on the Harland has to earn oxygen, and for eighteen years, I’ve been almost entirely useless.”

  The boys exchanged a look.

  “Fisher, I can’t do this.” Ned held up his hands. “Not now.”

  “Wait.” Fisher leaned forward. “We might be able to work something out.”

  “‘We’?” Pendt asked.

  Ned took a deep breath, but it was Fisher who spoke.

  “Even after your birthday, as a spacer, the head of your family controls where you work, right?” he asked. Pendt nodded. “So whenever your aunt comes back, you’ll have no legal recourse to stay here.”

  “No,” Pendt said. “My plan wasn’t very thorough. I mostly intended to hide.”

  “This is going to sound like a lot,” Fisher said. He pushed the vegetable platter towards her. She was fascinated by the colours. “But I think you should listen to my whole proposal before you react.”

  “See, you put it like that, and you’re guaranteed to have a blow-up,” Ned said. “We were going to offer to trade you all the credits you wanted and the nicest set of apartments on the station for a, uh, specific set of genes, but that won’t be enough to save you if your aunt comes back.”

  “You want me to what?” Pendt said, horrified. It was everything she had left the Harland to avoid.

  “It won’t work anyway,” Ned said. “So never mind.”

  “Listen to me, both of you,” Fisher said. They stilled. “Pendt, it sounds like the Harland was awful and we want to help you escape from it if you can, but we’re in a tight situation too. If anything happens to Ned, the whole station dies. You both want freedom from the roles you were born into, and you can secure it for each other.”

  “How?” Pendt asked.

  “Marriage,” Fisher said.

  There was a moment of total silence.

  “Of all the antiquated shit you dig up, you have to pick that?” Ned said. “It’s unheard of.”

  “It’s still legal,” Pendt said. Her voice was speculative. “It removes me from my family and puts me in yours. My aunt can’t claim me. You’re the one who would make decisions.”

  “Actually, it’s Fisher,” Ned said, his voice flat. “He’s older.”

  “You’d still need a baby,” Pendt said. This was something she understood. This was a business arrangement. Just with higher-than-usual stakes.

  Ned winced.

  “Well, yes,” Fisher said. “Specifically, one with a Y chromosome. Can you do that?”

  Three hours ago, even thirty minutes ago, Pendt would have said no. But that was before bread. That was before cheese. That was before whatever “sweets” turned out to be.

  “I’ve never done anything like that before,” Pendt said. “Changing myself is easy, even with only a bit of extra food. It only took me twenty-eight grams of protein to do this to myself.

  “But changing another person is more complicated. I can’t imagine changing a grown-up. I’ve been around two developing embryos, though, and it did seem like I could have made the changes, especially if it were, uh, as personal and as early on as possible.”

  “You mean sex?” Ned said. Now he looked really uncomfortable.

  “Can’t we do it artificially?” Fisher asked. He winced. “Uh, for a given value of ‘we.’”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Pendt said.

  “Humour me,” Ned said.

  “Well”—Pendt grinned at his discomfort—“when two people love each other very much—”

  “Nope!” Ned held up a hand. “Just skip to the part after ejaculation.”

  “I can make sure a Y chromosome makes contact,” Pendt said as delicately as possible to preserve his sensibilities. “It’s easier than changing things afterwards, and it’s easier when there are no medical distractions. Above all, it’s easier when it’s . . . inside.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Ned said.

  “Where’s Katla?” Pendt asked.

  Ned pointed immediately and unerringly through the crowd.

  “Oh,” he said and downed the rest of his drink.

  “So you get married, and your aunt can’t control you,” Fisher said. “And Ned gets a replacement Brannick. And the station gets stability.”

  “That’s a very clinical way of putting it,” Pendt said.

  “I am trying very hard to not picture my brother having sex with a girl we just propositioned in a bar,” Fisher told her. “It seems overly intrusive.”

  In spite of everything, or perhaps because her adrenaline was finally wearing off and her stomach was full for the first time in her life, Pendt burst into giggles. Her laughter was infectious, and Fisher soon found that he was joining in. Even Ned recovered from his indignity enough to smile about the situation. At least they all seemed friendly enough, since it appeared they were about to be legally stuck with one another.

  “All right then, if it’s okay with you?” she said to Ned. He nodded.

  “We’ll have to wait until your birthday for the marriage to be totally legal,” Fisher reminded them. “If we do it before then, your aunt could contest it, and even though I trust most of the legal representatives on the station, it’s possible she’d go somewhere else to argue it.”

  “Well,” Pendt said. Ned blushed. “I guess we’ve got a week to get to know each other.”

  13.

  THEY SPENT THE WEEK hammering out the details of the marriage contract—at Ned’s insistence—and exploring every possible hypothetical way to create a viable embryo—at Fisher’s. Since both of these things were in Pendt’s best interest, and since they kept letting her eat whatever she wanted, they had her full cooperation.

  “What if there are two contracts?” Pendt suggested on the fifth day.

  Ned had been fiddling with the wording of the family association section of the contract for hours, trying to make it
so that Pendt was entirely free of the Harlands while maintaining her freedom from the Brannicks.

  “How would doubling the paperwork make anything better?” Ned asked.

  “Well, the marriage contract is basically between me and Fisher, since he’s the head of the family,” Pendt said. “And what upsets you is the part where I belong to you as a result. So we write a second contract where you give that up, and we just . . . don’t tell anybody. It’ll be legal and it’ll make you feel better.”

  Ned considered it.

  “That works for me,” he said finally. “I know I’m a decent human being and I would never take advantage of you, but the wording makes my skin crawl.”

  “Fisher?” Pendt asked. “What about you?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Fisher said. “I’m not the one marrying you. I am glad you’ve got it settled, though, because I have more questions about, you know, the other part.”

  Pendt rolled her eyes. Boys were so squeamish. Now that she had full control over what was happening to her, she found that the idea of pregnancy and reproducing no longer bothered her. Since she had enough calories to access her connection to the æther, she had never felt more independent and alive. It was new and more than a little bit selfish, but she didn’t care.

  “I appreciate your consideration of my feelings and person,” Pendt said. “But there are lives at stake. Everyone on the station, even if they don’t know what we’re up to, relies on us creating a viable genetic heir. If we were just experimenting, I’d be happy to give you all the eggs you wanted and work with them under controlled conditions in a medical laboratory, but we don’t have that luxury. I need to be able to manage the variables myself, and this way, well, I can.”

  Fisher sighed. “As long as you’re comfortable, I guess,” he said. “I just . . . Bodies are important, you know? And you always thought you were going to lose control of yours, and I want to be sure that Ned and I don’t treat you the same way.”

  Bodies were a fraught subject with Fisher. Pendt had told the boys the lurid details of her upbringing on the Harland, and their horror at her situation actually made it a bit easier to tell them the personal details. The only thing she hadn’t talked about yet was Tanith’s procedure. They were already tetchy enough about babies. Through all of it, Fisher had not volunteered any personal information, and Pendt hadn’t asked. It was none of her business unless Fisher decided it was, and so far, he hadn’t.

  “You two could not be more different from my family,” Pendt assured them both.

  “Speaking of,” Ned said. “There hasn’t been anything in communications from the Harland. Is it possible they haven’t missed you yet?”

  Pendt considered it. The galley staff would have reported her absence immediately. It had been graveyard shift when she escaped, which bought her the most time, but either she’d have been missed at breakfast or Lodia would have noticed the vent as soon as she entered her quarters.

  “They’ve definitely missed me,” Pendt said. “They just don’t have any way to come back for me, so there’s not much point in talking about it. They can’t threaten you over the comm channels, and they don’t have any way to contact me directly.”

  “There’s a benefit to that,” Fisher said. “After your birthday, we won’t have to keep you a secret anymore. You can have free run of the station and tell anyone you want who and what you are. You can even train with our gene-mages, if you like.”

  “That would be amazing,” Pendt said.

  A chime sounded softly, and Ned groaned. The boys still had to go to operations for their shift every day.

  “It’s only for a bit longer,” Pendt said. “Then I’ll be able to take your place, or at least help out.”

  When the boys were gone for work, the best part of Pendt’s day began. She liked the Brannicks, and not just because they talked to her like she was a person, but when they left her alone, she was able to fully embrace what it meant to be a gene-mage.

  She carried her breakfast tray to the calo-recycler. The boys had already put their trays through. Doing her own dishes on a full stomach wasn’t so bad. Also, this model was much more advanced than the one on the Harland. All Pendt had to do was put the tray inside, close the door, and press a button. The whole galley in the boys’ apartment was like that: clean, new, and easy to use. It was so different from what Pendt had grown up with that it didn’t trigger any bad memories.

  She snagged a few pieces of cheese out of the refrigeration unit on her way out of the room. Ned was correct: It was the best. Pendt had read about it the first morning after the boys left. It used to be made with the lactation products of large bovine animals, but early space travelers had learned how to make it without bringing the cow. Pendt appreciated their priorities.

  Her favourite room in the boys’ apartment was the greenhouse. It was a small enclosure off the lounge, sealed because of the high temperature and humidity. It was, Fisher told her, nothing compared with the station’s hydroponics, which Pendt was welcome to visit as soon as it was safe to do so, but in the meantime, she was more than satisfied.

  She chewed the cheese and swallowed it. It wasn’t the best source of calories, but Pendt didn’t care. She had options now, and her actual breakfast had been more than enough to give her enough fuel for the day. Anything else she ate was, at this point, entirely for her own use. And the greenhouse called to her.

  It had only been a few days, but Pendt had learned more about the æther and her powers with it than she had in the entire time she’d been on the Harland. Ever since she was small and had been denied access to the ship’s hydroponics, Pendt had wondered about plants. Now, with full access to them, she surrounded herself with greenery and just breathed it in.

  Plants on a spaceship had two functions: They produced oxygen to supplement what the carbon scrubbers recycled, and they were a source of food. On Brannick Station, there was a third function, one that Pendt was coming to appreciate more and more every day she spent here. On the station, plants were also just plants. They were decorations or something to fiddle around with when a person was off shift. There were flowers that were pretty to look at and several herbs that provided no additional caloric value to food but did enhance its flavour. There were tiny trees that Fisher said his mother had tended and shaped, and something called a tomato, which Ned promised her would be ready in a few months.

  In the greenhouse, Pendt was free to practice. She learned the genetic pattern of each plant and was quick to identify if any of them were in danger of getting sick. Most of the plants were clones, which made sense given the remote location of Brannick Station, and that meant that a weakness in one of them would quickly spread to the others. Pendt didn’t find anything dire, but she was able to shore up the plants’ defenses.

  With the extra slices of cheese on hand, Pendt went deep into one of the little trees’ genetic code. She knew from reading that trees were usually large, too large for a small apartment greenhouse. She wanted to see the part of the pattern that made the tree small. It took her a few minutes, but she saw it soon enough. It was like a switch had been flipped in the tree’s childhood, making it small enough to stay in the Brannicks’ home. It didn’t cause the tree distress—if anything, constant babying had made the tree ludicrously healthy—but Pendt could see the spot where growth was stopped as clearly as she could see her own hand.

  The difference with plants was that Pendt could change them after they had achieved maturity. She didn’t just diagnose and shape; she altered, the æther flowing from her fingers as she worked it. With the calories to power her magic, it was almost easy, and she reveled in it.

  “I wonder why I can change plants and not people?” she’d mused the second evening after giddily reporting to the boys what she’d learned how to do.

  “Maybe there’s a difference between being alive and being, well, alive,” Fisher had theorized. “I don
’t think plants mind if you change them, but people are different. More complicated.”

  It was the best idea any of them had come up with, and it allowed Pendt to practice manipulating genetic code. This was the biggest change she had ever attempted. She’d made sure to ask permission—she knew the trees were special and she wasn’t entirely sure what would happen—and both Brannicks understood why she needed to try.

  Most of the plants in the greenhouse were young, newly grown in the past few months or perennials that reemerged every cycle. The little trees were old. Catrin Brannick had received them when she was a girl, and they’d been old then. It was the most complicated change Pendt had ever tried on purpose.

  “I’m going to do my best,” Pendt whispered to the tree.

  Then she sank back into its code, found the switch that stopped it from growing. When she reached for it, there was no warning from her body that she was about to overextend or put herself in danger. There was only surety, a sense that this was what she was made for.

  Pendt flipped the switch.

  The tree didn’t suddenly grow eight metres of new branches or anything. Externally, it was entirely undramatic. The leaves didn’t even shake. But inside, Pendt could see the effects of what she’d unleashed. The tree flooded with light and water, making food for itself to support a growth spurt. It would still take time, since branches and trunk had to be reinforced to support each new inch, but the tree would grow, if she left it.

  Pendt ate another slice of cheese and went back into the tree’s pattern. She found the switch and flipped it back. The tree instantly went back to its former state, and Pendt checked for any lasting effects. As far as she could tell, there was no damage. The tree would probably grow a little bit, since it had expended the effort while Pendt was studying it, but aside from that, it was unchanged. Not only had she done the magic to alter the tree, she had correctly calculated how many calories she would require to put it back.

  She pulled herself out of the tree and leaned against the wall of the greenhouse. It wasn’t very comfortable, but she was tired. This too was a new feeling for her. She’d been exhausted before, pushed to the brink of system failure by a lack of calories, but this was different. This was the kind of tired that meant good things had been done, and that she would be able to do them again tomorrow. Her body was learning to rest normally, not because it was out of fuel.