Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (28 page)

Lyric plays their voices for you and translates, highlighting keywords, flashing visual cues to help you get a better sense of meaning and intent. You’ve listened to the recordings so often that you’ve half memorized the words. You’ve even shared excerpts with a few members of your online community, and the verdict has been that it’s all “NT stuff. Nothing special.”

Which is irrelevant, of course, because while you can’t quite understand how it was for your parents, the voices you’ve captured are theirs, and that alone gives them value.

The recording of your father’s voice is the oldest, taken during his last days before you even started using Lyric. The recording of your mother’s was made a couple of months before her heart attack. They are the voices of the dead but they are important to you.

You would have wanted to record Rae’s voice as well, but in your regular morning sessions she deliberately plays the role of listener so that you are forced to be the speaker. Even in the few other times that you were together outside of work—meeting Jenny and Polly, eating lunch in the canteen, intervening on your behalf after the meltdown—she talked only about Jenny or your work. Never about her and you.

The day she returns from her seminar and visits you is hardly the opportunity you’ve been waiting for, though. She has learned that you haven’t been to work; you find it impossible to meet her stony glare. You decide immediately that you will not roll up your sleeves to show her the bandaged gashes on your forearms. The two of you are quiet as you show her the Animal sulking in its cage; she is decidedly unimpressed, especially when you tell her that it has not eaten since it was delivered here almost a week ago.

In the living room, she goes over your copy of the purchase forms and contract, sighing occasionally at their irreversibility. “The only time it will stop being yours before the designated three-year lifespan is after you’ve decided to terminate it early,” she tells you. “Either way, payment will be deducted from your salary for the next six years—long after it’s dead. Did you understand that when you signed your money away?”

“Money,” you say, and Lyric suggests the appropriate syntax, “Money did not matter.”

You read the disagreement in her face, but what else can you say? How can two people who think so differently begin to understand each other?

Rae leans back in her seat and stares at you. “Can I ask you something? Why were you so dead set on that specific Animal?”

Why, why, why—the hardest question of them all. She waits for you as you prompt Lyric to help you answer it in a way that she might understand.

“Temple Grandin, cattle, humane,” Lyric says. Its search yields a quotation about how a person who thinks in words can even imagine that cattle have feelings. You read it aloud for Rae, but she doesn’t know the name, and doesn’t make the connection.

“Is it because you liked how different it was from the other items in the company catalog?” she asks, her brow furrowed in an earnest attempt to guess what it is that you were thinking. “Or because you thought it would have something extraordinary about it other than its physical strangeness? Or did you pity it for being so damaged?”

You start to flap your hands, and hurriedly she clasps them in hers. “Relax and breathe,” she reminds you, her touch soft and kind, but your hands extricate themselves from her grasp nonetheless.

“All right, I’ll let you be,” she says, a smile of resignation crossing her face. “But only because I still have jet lag. I’ll see you at work on Monday, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I hope you get it to eat. I’m surprised it’s still alive.”

You remain seated in the living room for some time after Rae leaves. You let yourself think of hummingbirds, lovely apparitions of which you’ve only seen pictures and videos. You wonder if hummingbirds are real.

When dinnertime comes, you approach the Animal’s cage with two sets of meals. One is yours, chicken and rice. You switch off the electric field so that you can eat in peace two feet away from the iron bars. It can continue to ignore its food, but if it wanted to, it can reach out and take either rice or chicken from your plate. The Animal is lying on its side, immobile from hunger, and its nose twitches as it watches you polish off your food. But it still doesn’t touch it’s own meal.

“What do you like?” you ask loudly. Its ears twitch at the sound of your voice. You glance at the device in your hand, where Lyric is on standby, and suddenly you think of your father’s sincere inflections, your mother’s soothing tone. Flustered, you stammer out, “To eat. Eat. What to eat?”

It catches a whiff of your excitement, raising its head a little, nose twitching endlessly. “Eat chicken?” you ask, jumping up to get what remaining meat you can find. Some defrosted shreds of chicken left. You grab a few and push it into the cage gap.

The Animal moves across the floor and uses one hand to pick up the meat. It sniffs it, licks it, nibbles, bites. It reaches for another scrap, and then one wing extends too, clutching another piece of chicken. The flesh in its claws reminds you of your own, and you press down on your wounds, as if to pacify them.

“Don’t be afraid,” you tell yourself aloud, and the Animal’s ears twitch again, flexing almost imperceptibly towards you.

It is what it is.

Maybe you can coax it to live.

“High Handed” by Jane Baker

Previous Page:

The setting is of a busy market place on an alien planet. In the background of the image, there are two suns in the sky, a small flying spaceship, and odd looking buildings and plants. In the middle of the image, a woman, who is wearing a visor and a loosely-draped robe, has her back to the viewer. She is interacting with a small child who is apparently trying to purchase some spotted fruits. In the foreground of the image is the back of the seller woman’s stall where there are two other children. In the centre of the image, there is an alien child in a dress, holding a stuffed toy, who has eyes on long antenna-like stems. One of her eyes is looking backwards at the seller, and the other eye is watching the human child next to her. On the left bottom side of the image, there is a human child, who has long hair, is wearing only shorts (no shoes or shirt), and has a prosthetic right arm. This child is standing on their tiptoes, holding their detached right prosthetic arm in their left hand in order to reach a high cage on top of wooden crates that contains a small animal.

Courting the Silent Sun

Rachael K. Jones

Renee and Ismael can never agree about the lights. He wants them off when they make love so the glorious sweep of Renee’s skin under his fingers become his whole world. But if he reaches for the switch, she swipes at the dragonfly that rests behind his ear. It peels off easily beneath damp fingers, fluttering clockwork wings and eyes that glow like windows in burning houses. She could crush it if she tried. It is well-made, resistant to water and pressure, sweat and oils from skin and hair, but delicate, full of tiny coiled machines which give him the gift of tongues. She flings it into the air, and it flies, circles the room, and lands again on his ear. Without it, his world plunges back into the watery depths of his childhood, to the time when he lived by eyes and touch and taste alone. When it returns, Renee brushes it off again.

That’s not fair
, Ismael signs, more playful than angry, because Renee is all magnificent dark curves and soft potbelly and hard obsidian eyes.

When you are with me, Husband, you will live in my world only. Besides, I want to look at you. I am going to do something very wicked.
Her gaze is predatory, her teeth hungry on his earlobe, and the lights stay on.

They have made a pact to make love every day they are in space, all thirty days to the war in Vega, because who knows when they will ever get the chance again. Each day, weight reduces as the ship’s computer dials down the artificial gravity until it is gone, power diverted to the FTL drive. Halfway through the journey, the process will reverse.

Day one: full gravity. Missionary position on the thin mattress on the floor.

Day five: three quarters gravity. Lateral position, Ismael on top but not crushing Renee. His weight reminds her of an old girlfriend, the smell of strawberry shampoo on the pillow at night.

Day ten: one quarter gravity. He presses her bare back against the chilly triple-thick window that overlooks the void, Renee’s hand resting lightly on Ismael’s clavicle to buoy herself up against him. It feels like flying.

Day fifteen: zero G. Top or bottom lose all meaning—just hot, damp limbs tumbling round and round each other, a new center of gravity.

Renee has always had her own orbital force. He remembers her from across the bar, all the pilot wannabes vying for her attention, Renee the Ace, the hotshot, the one who could fly circles around all of them. Renee ignoring them. Bored. Swizzling her half-finished beer higher and higher up the side of the glass until it almost boiled over, but didn’t. She never spilled a drop.

Renee ordered the chaos. She missed nothing. She commanded a room like a guardian goddess, which was also how she watched the void.

Everyone has an opinion on what Vega should be, who should use it. Some call it a human heritage site. This is what they tell children during astronomy lessons when they pick out that distant star and say, Look! That is the Promised Land, where you can be anything you want. Where you can take a whole island for a private kingdom. Where you will find room for all of your dreams.

Others see economic opportunity, that Earth’s great mining vessels might touch down in those distant oceans and fall deep into the rock below, which are streaked through with gold and rare minerals.

Others see a nature preserve. No human should go there at all. The colonies should be dismantled, all traces of settling removed. Vega is no place for a new imperialism.

The Vegans themselves, descended in centuries past from the first colonists, have no such debate. They learned to live in the thin atmosphere and adapt to the new flu strains. They have graveyards for the dead and days of remembrance unobserved on Earth. They pray to gods that never looked upon Sol, and their language is estranged. Now all diplomats must wear the dragonflies to understand them.

It has been ten years since they murdered the last diplomat and returned her mummified tongue in her shuttle, flung carelessly on a long trajectory back home.

In the mess hall, Ismael can always feel the other passengers staring.
They are jealous because we are so in love
, Renee signs.

No, it’s because you intimidate them
. Ismael is closer to the mark, but he cheats with his dragonfly. Renee doesn’t point this out. Instead, she draws him into a long kiss in front of everyone, her tongue probing and lingering in his mouth, uncaring of their stares. Her whole life she has felt them watching her, and Ismael knows she likes it that way.

They always wait until their backs are turned to gossip. Hearing people are like that. They hold their words like drinks in long-stemmed glasses, offered and snatched back after one sip.

I’ve got to report to Navigation,
she signs when he finally gasps and breaks the kiss.
Meet you at our room in three hours.

In the hallway outside their room, a hearing woman stops Ismael. He remembers her from boarding day.

“I’m Lacy. We’re staying next door.” She extends her hand. “Me and my husband Ivan.”

Ismael,
he signs, and the sensors in his gloves signal the dragonfly, which buzzes and speaks the words for her benefit with a perfect accent. He is self-conscious about his voice. He never fully eliminated the traces of his Deafness in his speech, not after all these years.

“Your language is so beautiful,” Lacy notes with a patronizing smile that Ismael knows too well. Renee would hate this woman. “How do you say hello in sign language?”

He wants to say
you just wave, you dumbass
, but that wouldn’t be politic, and Ismael prides himself on his diplomacy.

As a gift to Renee, he teaches the hearing woman how to say
Nice to meet you
, except he bypasses the autotranslator and makes it
Nice to fuck you
—only a single finger’s difference. He almost feels bad about it, until she adds:

“One more thing. I don’t know if you realize this, because of how you are—” a slight emphasis, a dismissive twirl of the hand—“but the walls are thin, and sound carries more than you think.” She raises an eyebrow significantly, and Ismael hates her for it, but gives her his sweetest aw-shucks Deaf boy smile.

Thanks for telling me
, he says.
I’ll try to keep that in mind.

The Perseus is a military-class warship transporter. There are thirty-six jets tucked in each hangar, each with their own nuclear payload. Renee’s jet is the fastest, but only because she is. There are no parachutes aboard. Their landing gear is not tooled to land on an alien world like Vega. There are no radios tuned for communication with the Vegan way stations on the planet’s surface, and there are no programs like the one that runs Ismael’s dragonfly that can speak their tongue.