Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (21 page)

It’s got another sense, too, strange to me: electric zaps and tingles with nowhere to go, leaving it confused as I was in my vertigo. I’ve insisted they give it a bigger box, a tub of water to wallow in. It pings its electricity off the plastic sides of the tub and hums to itself constantly, a discontent whining thrum. Everyone in the lab’s starting to hate it. Bet they wish
they
could turn off their hearing now. They only get peace when we’re hooked up, it and me, curled together in memory-dark, sharing half-memory without words. Smell of a baby’s head, taste of riverweed and strange fish, Saira’s hands on my skin, sharp sweet jolt of a barbed dick inside us. I’m filling in all sorts of facts for the xenobiologists: they’re the ones who really love me now. Not sure what good it does anyone, this knowledge of a dying species on a torn-up world. Seem to be getting even more bitter these days, don’t I? And people think old ladies’re sweet.

And now. And now we’re going down. My body in close orbit, catsnake’s down to the surface. In the linkage still, and I’m caught in its confusion, the horrible pressure. Both of us screaming. Thick air of its tank shaking. Our bones are splitting—

—and then there is freedom, the wide soft air in which to run far and fast and then free of all the strangeness to leap and twist, dancing delighted loops under a double moon in doubled shadows, there is the river and its taste, familiar-unfamiliar home at last all full of whiskered things that swim and we are in the bottom-mud all stomach-wriggling hunting in hunger for the savour of real food after immeasurable incomprehensible long and homehomehome here an abandoned den to nest in all tail-over-nose and warm and safe
parlakparlakyouhavetomoveit
for time without measure in the slow warm dark.

parlak can you hear me. you have to move it. north-west, their camp is north-west.

in the slow. warm. dark.

parlak.

warmdarkwarmdarkwecan’thearyou

parlak. aliye.

no.

mum.

romaan? (catsnake confused: no names here.) (the kit, the kit that survived.) romaan. What?

go north-west, parlak. mum.

moving confused-obedient, body bending to the river. romaan like this?
yes mum.
deep drumming of machines. taste of metal in not-water, vibration, electricity all wrong. up out of the water, almost-voices, strange smells

there, parlak, there, we’re recording. go further in.

shapes moving, vast and almost-formless. not one looks at catsnake, another animal slinking along. ones closelike to catsnake chained up, yowling protest at intrusion. pets? guards? humans’ve never been this close. only glimpses on screens

lightblare sudden, handshapes reaching, sirens all piercing skin and it

hurtshurtshurt
pull back pull back parlak get out they’ve detected our signal
and PAINPAINPAIN whiter than light all bloodsmell and
run
go go go waterseeking dive deep engines on water vibrating following. bowels voiding sudden sharpwater stink. deeper twist and flee, swamps shallow and streams thin, up and over down again twisting, catsnake-and-woman flee flee flee and there is

so

much

pain.

darkplace found, hiding now. i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i did this to you, we did, the pain, i’m sorry. this is our fault, oh god, our fault. are we dying?

our belly hurts so very much

and then

…shhhh, otherperson, rider, it tells us without words. shhhh forget, come back to riverlair safe and sleep, safenest dark and silence shhh. come back to dreams of kitsandbabes, lullaby quietsoft sleep. shh now forever silence dreams, no more machine loudshouting no more the headvoice intruding
mum
and we are back in riverdeep
mum
metaltaste slipaway silence song and home to lair and we are back in rock-a-bye memory and we are
_mum
we are we are we.

river is taste softdreaming always. remember whiskerfish crunch tasteonthetongue and home to lair, curl around. tail over nose yoursandmine, share again the memory of scaleskin and babysmell, little fingers counting lullaby sheep baabaablack and piggies gone to market. what pigssheep, otherself? and we show though we have never touched, share pictures once on screens of pink and woolly shape, otherworld wonder to us both. mothermother curled in dark, otherother nested minds together away from war

(what is war, otherself)

(hush, hisst, rock-a-bye quiet. goodbye to all that. glad I am to say it)

_{aliye, we have to break the linkage. that thing’s dying, we have to get you out. you have to wake up. aliye.}

do you remember/we remember. this is the taste of parsley, catsnake/this is the winter dreaming, otherself. we remember. we. we do. (I will.)

kkkkkk

Mum. Mum kkkou alright?

fuck off, romaan. just—fuck off/// i told you before to turn that thing off/// go away. i’m done. i quit i quit. leave me be.

Rip the connections out of the metal holes in my skull, wheel away fast. Get away, get away (deeper twist and flee through swamp and river), nails prying at the implants, ripping pain but they won’t come out. I don’t want to hear or walk, not again, never wanted to, that stupid side effect of war-usefulness that I was supposed to love. I can’t I won’t. Not part of that world ever again (sorry Daddy not sorry), not used as a warmachine instrument, soft furscale or skin body (Saira Leish Persis me) become a weapon and lost.

Another voice forced on me all
Parlak this is insubordination
and
courtmartial
and
lost her mind
. I hunch down in riverdark memory and rock, as best I can. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Oh, my dead dear, forgive.

Playa Song

Petra Kuppers

The hour of change. Stripes of brown, and silver, a blinding white, and a grey-blue that keeps morphing. Merl lifts her head, the cracks in the dry playa floor now a red relief embedded in her cheek. Where she touches the earth there is heat, and tingling, and on her back, the sun is beginning to scorch its own pattern into her hide. The summer dress is gone, red poppies dissolved in a moment’s light, only a shriveled ring of fabric around Merl’s neck left behind. She pulls it free, and throws it away. She needs to move. And she needs to find water.

The playa stretches ahead, all the way to the distant purple-hazed mountains. Merl’s arms have such trouble supporting her, each handstep so painful, desert plants pricking her palms. The wheelchair lies twisted on its side, metal fused into a new sculpture. The spokes curve into the horizon, akilter, and the hub of the wheel has blossomed out with aluminum tongues. No one will sit on this chair anymore.

All around, the lightning strike has branded the ground. About four feet out, as far as her arms can drag her, Merl sees where the flash has marked its visit on earth. On this side, beneath her, sand has shifted into glass. On the other side, the ordinary salty sand keeps its wind and water patterns. The glass is getting hotter. She has to find a way to leave.

Her testing finger on the non-fused sand quickly retreats. Hot. And sticky, leaving grainy residue that will destroy even her callused palms much too quickly, long before Merl can crawl toward assistance.

Colored fracture lines in the glass hold the cracked patterns of the earth.

One finger, then two, insert themselves in one of the larger cracks. Merl applies pressure. A small explosion. With a ‘ping’ glass separates at a hair-line crack farther out. The rift in the glass moves a fraction. Merl lowers her face to the glass. She feels a cooler breath of air exhaling in an ozone-rich whiff.

The ‘ping.’ This is indeed real glass, and she can hear the scratches of her steel-toe boots as she shifts herself on the smooth surface.

She turns on her back. Her face to the sun high above, climbing steeply on its path, ready to burn the life out of her. She takes in a full breath, arranges herself in a pentagram on the glass, in the middle of the irregular circle fused into the desert.

She sings.

Sound breathes from her lips, first in small sips and hiccups, swelling as the mouth finds its moisture, hidden deep, and tissues lubricate with the swell of the sound.

She sings.

Sound escalates, vibrates, her monstrous wheelchair picking up the waves like an alien antenna, amplifying the sound.

She sings.

Sound mounts and bursts, her vocal cords stretching and deepening in exercise after exercise, running the scales. A small mouse, scurrying across the playa in search of a grain and shade, stops and twitches its whiskers.

She sings.

As the sun reaches its zenith high above, the sound is ready, bursting forth from burning lungs, superheated pressure shaping itself in a larynx that has survived so many toxic breaths already.

At the stroke of noon echoing across from the Wild West church steeple barely visible from the playa’s flatness, the song zings its final crescendo, sustained, high, pitched to find impurities and the pressure lines that keep it all together.

The glass bursts.

The sound descends.

The singer falls.

The earth swallows, and belches a spring.

Water sucks its way out of deep strata, a hydraulics of pressure geysering in the wild.

The founder of the oasis swims in languid laps, and the playa blooms.

18 hours before the founding of the desert spring. The red sun is setting over the playa. The founder manipulates her chair wheel out of the back seat. A snap, and the yellow frame connects to the hub. Another twist, stressful on an already weak back, and the second wheel appears, held in her brown hand. She brings the complex machinery together, and the spindle of the wheel slides into the axle without a hitch.

A satisfying click, and the chair is upright, balanced, a thing of rounded beauty on the hard-baked sand. She swings herself into it, closes the Prius’s door, locks it, and wheels around.

The bands of the high desert lie in front of her: the border of the salt lakes, the alkaline waters shimmering in the evening heat, the layers of horizon and rising air. Birds swoop through the bands, knitting modern abstract art out of the pastel banding.

Merl releases her hands downward, gives a first hesitant push out into this wildness. The square blocks of the city are far behind, and this will be her realm, for the next four weeks, her artist residency, far away from it all.

She avoids looking at her car as she wheels forward—refuses to acknowledge the heavy scratches that have disfigured the shiny lacquer. The last sign of the urban unrest. Merl’s mind is crawling toward peace, away from the screaming metal sounds that surrounded her when she had run the gauntlet out toward the 80 freeway entry off University. Away from the figures, bearded, some tattooed, encased in dirty Gore-Tex or bamboo fibers, who used scrap metal, bicycle chains or their own high-end car keys to mark her beloved Prius trying to make it up onto the freeway bridge, inching its way past soft flesh and destructive metal.

Berkeley was exploding—and she rode the first shockwave out of town, long before the sidewalks were ripped up, streets blockaded, the city locked down and gnarled in place. She made it. A deep breath. The air is marked by altitude and the slight sour taste of the alkali salts floating amid the dust.

Eventually, she does turn back to the scratched Prius, and, with a press of the key, the trunk opens to reveal a row of sturdy sharp-edged boxes. Whole Foods produce, her nourishment for the next four weeks. Merl’s stars had shone on her, had directed her to complete her shop the day before the glint of metal began to shimmer up and down Telegraph, Shattuck and University Avenues. She had managed to snag almond butter and cans of fava beans, high-protein staples that had by now run out in all Berkeley stores.

In Lakeview, Oregon, just one hour away from her high desert residency home, she had stocked up on all perishables, yogurt, cheeses, fresh vegetables and fruit, in the dependable and slightly old-fashioned Safeway.

Merl hefts the first of the boxes out of the trunk and onto her lap. With a firm twist of her wrist, she wheels over to the cottage door, and a push of her finger opens the door to her personal retreat. Coolness and raw pine wood exhale back at her, and she crosses the threshold. On the other side of the patio, the playa lies wide and open.

24 hours before the first geysering of the desert spring. At Café Gratitude, high up Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue, Carla stiffens. She is sitting in the snug corner made between the cooling display and the bar divider, safely out of the way, not visible to anybody looking in from the street door.

Is she really safe enough? Carla can’t quite parse what is going on outside, why hipsters and street citizens are on the rampage together, what the agenda is, where her own politics lie. Carla loves the Bay Area Public School, the anti-gentrification activists who make their rent by getting grants for performance art and travel the world, loves her mates at Small Press Distribution, the poets of activism and protest. So are these them, the mild graduate students, the human chain links who re-tell their stories of walking and standing with the longshoremen in Oakland’s harbor, freezing the supply chains in their tracks? Or is this a different crowd, a lustier brand, swinging different kinds of chains with a jaunty air, ready to crack their Doc Martens down onto the next cockroach that tries to scuttle across the park?

Carla is bewildered, but understands that her way of grasping Berkeley’s political worlds might have run its course, might have become irrelevant the moment the first bussed-in police officer’s throat was cut, and a geyser of blood drenched the front window of the Himalayan restaurant down the street. The politics might have vanished an hour before this gurgling cut, alongside a wall of posters for screenings of
Fruitvale Station
, when the first five protesters found themselves astonished when another police officer’s hand did not hold a nightstick, or pepper spray, but a fully loaded automatic weapon. The protesters suddenly understood the finality of the change when the officer had mowed them down, neat as a sewing machine, bullet-holes ripping apart the wooden shielding around the building site.