The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [0]
FIRST EDITION
The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter © 2011 by Brent Hayward
Cover artwork © 2010 by Erik Mohr
Cover design © 2011 by Corey Beep
Interior artwork © 2011 by Nimit Malavia
All Rights Reserved.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Hayward, Brent
The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter / Brent Hayward.
ISBN 978-1-926851-13-6
I. Title.
PS8615.A883F43 2011 C813'.6 C2011-900685-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
info@chizinepub.com
Edited and copyedited by Brett Alexander Savory
Proofread by Samantha Beiko
Converted to mobipocket and epub by Ryan McFadden http://ryanmcfadden.com
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
For mothers, especially mine, with apologies to Robert Burton
the first partition
the second partition
about the author
the first partition
The women hung there, awkwardly, grinding their teeth, hearts pounding and libidos stilling, ditto the tiny rockets at their wrists and ankles. There were three of them, suspended above this inert console, in the head of the mother. Happier, moments ago, drifting across from their car, they had absorbed a tab of dat each, to make entering this ship—found static on the leeside of a class seven moon while they killed time on a furlough—all the more of a rush. They had raced around, exploring, hoping eventually to fuck inside that great empty body.
Through the apertures of valves neither closed nor opened in eons, around delicate latticework of structural guy wires, through tangled cables and emptied conduits—a gloved hand almost grabbing a boot but not quite—to be suddenly silenced, bumping first into each other and then, entwined, up against the inside surface of the great, curved cornea. Game over. What had been a strange and unexpected discovery was now infinitely stranger.
Distant stars coldly watched reflections of the women shimmering in the giant slow curve of the lens and on the covers of the gauges as they disentangled, like chastised children.
“Holy shit.”
“This mother should be barren.” Voices hissed in each others’ headgear. “I mean, she should be dead and fucking barren. You told us she’d be barren.” Beneath them, arcing out of sight, a cloud-shrouded planet occluded space. “What happened here? These bodies, these exemplars . . .”
“Stop freaking out. And they’re symbiotes. Ships this big needed symbiotes. Exemplars were on the broods. One on ones.”
“We should leave. This is fucking creepy.”
Crackling. The grey skin, open mouth.
“Nobody knows this mother is here, right? That’s what you’re thinking? That we’re the first people here?”
“Take a deep breath.”
“This isn’t an abandoned wreck. Something bad happened here. Something killed all the symbiotes, or whatever.”
“Maybe the supports went. The oxygen.”
“Just like that? This mother’s still alive, right now. Trapped in her own infrastructure. She’s fucking alive.”
“That’s crazy. She’s been here for hundreds . . .”
“Don’t touch a thing. Let’s split.”
Yet the women lingered, watching corpses of the symbiotes move ever so slightly in the disturbance they had brought aboard. One body was still tethered to the console. These crew had died quick.
“Do you think she was pretty?”
“Who? The ship?”
“No, that girl, right there.”
“Girl? That’s no fucking girl. She’s been dead ages. Look at her.”
“She’s like us.”
“You’re fucking high. She was never like us. Groomed to live up here, serving.”
“I’d like to, you know, really see her one day. You know? The way she was, when she was alive. Tell her it’s okay. Maybe just, feel her hair. I heard they were all orphans.”
“Jesus fucking