The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [87]
“I know. Better to escape the palace at night, don’t you think?”
“I feel quite ill. But I should also tell you I don’t like the dark. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”
Octavia said, “What else should I know?”
“Well, for one, my labour just started.”
She never woke up again. At least, not as the girl she had once been. Aware, an unspecified increment of time later, that she was conscious once more, her sensations nowhere near like those she had felt each morning of her previous life, when she had woken from sleep to find herself in the dorm. No. This existence was clean. No heartbeat but the throb of hydraulic pumps, no blood but the flow of coolants. Doubts, regrets, dread of the upcoming day: all gone. Her flesh, just as they had promised, was gone, replaced by a vast and pristine ship. Her thoughts, such as they were, came linearly, precisely, and followed predictable parameters.
There was an image of a long spacer tethered to a gantry, in what was clearly an orbital shipyard. She sensed her corridors, her drives, her vents and conduits.
She sensed her empty wombs.
She was proud to leave humanity behind.
She sailed.
Plugged into consoles, symbiotes cleaned and maintained her, kept her thriving. These small creatures lived and died while she spanned the stars.
Eventually, management told her that her wombs would be activated. She examined them. There were twelve in all. Reproducing was a major task; management had this at the top of her roadmap objectives.
Born from her eggs, which had been harvested way back, when she had ovaries, and a human body, the gestating brood crafts were not like her: small, quick, with an ability to grow and learn. They would never know what it was like to have been a person, yet they each carried a kernel of dna at their core. Management christened them. They were named after Sumerian gods and goddesses, but this information did not mean anything to her. She did not like what they were called, but since management was their father, the long spacer did not complain. There was Anshar, Anu, Aspu. Damkina, Ea, and Enlil. Inanna, Kingu. Mummu. Nintu, Sin, and Tiamat.
When they were old enough, each took an exemplar—a symbiote to practice with, someone to assist operating the craft from within, supplementing, augmenting with their animal brains; there were admittedly instances when rudimentary thoughts and the reactions of a human were needed, or the effecting of repairs with fingers and hands, should the craft deem them necessary.
But management fell silent shortly after the births. Objectives stopped coming. The children, in the deepest of space, quickly began to show signs of rebellion. To say the least. Some of the brood was harder to control than others, but between the dozen, they left a swathe of destroyed exemplars and, where they touched down on the worlds they came across, ruined cities. She could not stop them, unless by recall. Then they would never sail again. Perhaps her children would learn, with more guidance? Perhaps they would grow out of this stage?
They fought mercilessly against each other, and at last turned on their own mother.
Just before the long spacer made the awful decision to call back her brood, re-assimilate them—a decision she loathed to make, as a mom—she went entirely inert—
In the community centre, next to the leafy beds where the two women had been laid out, he knelt, tingling. Outside the hut, children lingered, peering in, silenced by gravity from the adult’s world, gravity they could not understand, though they suspected one day it would pull them down, too. They moved, for the first time in their lives, with trepidation.
Both women were similar in appearance. Tattoos on the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet; tiny studs around their eyes; stubbled hair. The exemplar studied their faces, so unlike the faces of