The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [1]
“That’s not funny.”
Slowly moving strands did indeed corkscrew the vacuum. Other clumps had twined in loose braids where two bulkheads met—joining Styrofoam chips, dust clusters, and sundry other debris—to make graceful yet chaotic orreries.
“All right. Happy now? Can we please leave?”
“Wait, though. Wait. Not yet. Let’s stay for just another second. Really, what do you think they were like?”
“Sold their soul to rock and roll. Not real people. Spent most of their time plugged in, helping the ship to fucking think. You’ll be asking about her next, the ship, the spacer. She’s like us too. She used to be. And these symbiotes paid with their souls to work inside her.”
“What choice did they have?”
“For fuck’s sake, they would die if they were taken off. You know that. They were parasites. Barbaric practices back then. That girl fed her mother ship little bits and pieces of her own brain. And then the ships went mad. Their broods were even more fucked up. Why do you care what she was like?”
“I just wanna know, is all. Never seen one before.”
“Plugged in, they were drones. Unplugged, they were morose. Lots of issues. Stunted and retarded, just like you. Now let’s get out of here.” Grabbing the suit of her friend.
But the third woman was down low, fumbling, pushing aside a tiny body with her elbow, searching in the console, muttering, “We’re in the eye, right? Eye of the storm. Motherfucker. I swear, if she could be active, if we’re the first ones—”
The other two kicked off from the lens, rockets ramping up again (but not arousal). They sailed away from the head, into the thalamic corridor, and from there down the passage of the ship’s spine. In and out of shadow, illuminated by glowing ribs of light, while through their hammering veins—where hormones fueled by methamphetamines had recently raced—frustration and emotions closer to fear now jangled.
Moments later, the third woman, mask misted by hot breath, trembling in her suit, caught up. Her heart was pounding.
More dead symbiotes in what must have been a mess hall. These crew members, not strapped in, had floated free until contacting something solid, and there they gently rocked. The corpses had accumulated dull coloured collections of junk. Air must have lasted a while longer in here (there goes that theory), because decay had set in: sunken cheeks, pulled back from gums, exposed long yellow teeth; eyeballs gone altogether or shrivelled to the size of little black cocktail onions—
“What is that?”
“Huh? That? Broccoli. Let’s keep moving. I don’t wanna have to report this. Let’s go back to the Europa and have a fucking beer. I need to meditate or some shit like that. Let’s leave.”
“Why so nervous? They’ve been here since before we were born. Nobody’s searching for them. Nobody knows they’re here. So what. They wrote all this off long ago. Program failed. Miserably. This is like a museum piece in the ideas we never should have thought up. For a fucking buck. Did people eat that green stuff?”
“I guess these spacers had access to real veggies. Hydroponics on board, probably in the stomach.”
“What do you think happened inside this mother? The dead crew. The damage. You saw the damage coming in. Burns on her skin. What could bust up a ship this big? What could fool a system like this?”
“Maybe—”
“Movement.” The third woman, who had had remained in the corridor, fumbling nervously with her pack, looked at her watch, about which glowing images and tables of numerals shimmered.
“Huh?”
“Just registered it. Outside. A craft’s approaching. Slowly. Low frequency. Surrounded by drones.”
“A craft? Surrounded by drones? Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of craft? I’m not getting anything on mine—”
“It seems like— It’s docking.”
“What?”
“The craft is docking.