Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (30 page)

Her lips pull sideways, caught between a frown and gentle grin.
You followed me. You figured it out.

Ismael searches the deep earth-brown of her eyes, hazards a guess.
You’re deserting.

She rests the missile sideways on the floor.
You make it sound like a bad thing. I call it “stopping a war.”

But Renee, you know what they did to their last diplomat.

Renee shrugs, opens the hatch.
They can take my tongue if they want. I’m not using it.

What makes you think they’ll listen to you? No one on the planet will even respond to our signals.

But you’re wrong about that. You should know by now what they’ve been telling us.
Renee pauses to rub behind her ear, looking straight through Ismael like he doesn’t exist at all.
They want to be left alone.

The missiles, then?

She squats down and runs a hand along the missile’s silver length.
Can’t bomb the colonies without bombs.

And the Vegans? What if they use them against us?

I guess we’ll just have to see whether they’re still human or not. But they deserve the chance to decide on their terms.

Ismael’s throat tightens. He realizes he cannot make her stay.
Oh, Renee.
He traces her name-sign down her cheek with soft, sad fingers.
Please. Please don’t leave me without your forgiveness. I am so, so sorry, Love.
Tears wet his cheeks.

She buries her fingers in his beard and tugs it toward her, kisses him deep, and it feels like a real kiss for the first time since their fight. Ismael’s shoulders shake with deep, wracking sobs. When he pulls back, her raking fingers lift away the dragonfly. It buzzes against the cage of her hand, its glowing red eyes set on his ear.

Now you will be in the Deaf world only, until we’re together again,
she tells him.

In the sudden silence left by the dragonfly, Ismael feels unbalanced, like the void waits just behind his heels. She has cut out his tongue. He leans into Renee’s gravity all at once, giving himself into her hands.
I love you.

I love you, too.

Will you help me load the rest of these?
she asks, nodding toward the cargo hold half-full of missiles.

Okay, I will.

In his last glimpse of Renee, she signs
Nice to fuck you
through the tinted glass of the cockpit. Her face is lost beneath her helmet, and her fingers clumsy in thick gloves. He thinks he sees the dragonfly shimmer against the glass, free and loose and frantic to get back to him, but perhaps he only imagines it.

Out the big viewing port, the jet falls into the void like a racing silver dragonfly. It circles once and flies toward the planet in slow motion.

Ismael shuts his eyes. He feels the void rush in all around him, wrapping close like it cradles his Renee. He imagines Vega. Mountain ranges dividing up continents. A civilization long estranged, a city split in two, a tongue divided and unintelligible. A dream of dragonflies pelting through the air, warheads gripped in their tiny little legs, traversing the great mountain peaks. But one dragonfly lifts into the air from Renee’s fingertips. It flies high, circles, and zooms back again.

Tell me why you volunteered.

I am going to do something very wicked.

On the bridge, people have marked Renee’s desertion, but Ismael slips by without notice in the bustle. He forces himself to walk—not run—to the broadcasting room, where he takes the prerecorded message offline.
Once there was a woman who left, and came home again,
he signs to the planet. Then, just in case, he says it again using his voice, and puts both messages on auto-broadcast. Maybe someday she will try the dragonfly again. Maybe she will signal from Vega. Maybe he will go to her next week on his own shuttle, on a newly invigorated diplomatic mission of peace. Or maybe the armistice will last forever, and no one will cross that mountain range again.

Across the widening distance, the dragonfly calls out for him, pressing to return, its signal locked forever to the numb spot behind his ear. There will be a reconciliation against the fire and ash, against the silence in the void. But someday, they will be together again. He has not forgotten their pact.

And Vega would be an interesting place to make love.

The dragonfly lifts, circles, and does not land.

“Everyday Future” by Tostoini

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The style of this image is abstract. There is a star map at the top of the image. In the centre of the image, a woman is sitting a table that has a steaming mug on it. The floor space around the woman has a repeating geometric tile design. The woman is looking down at a tablet. At the bottom of the image, there is an electronic device on the floor that is fabricating the wireframe outlines of the woman’s legs from her knees down.

In Open Air

David Jón Fuller

Soraiya Courchene wasn’t sure she’d heard Rotational Captain Genevieve Makwa correctly; but it sounded, as the captain peered at her monitor and held her chin thoughtfully, that she’d said, “Well, here’s something new.”

In four generations aboard, even in the one-thousand-odd days of that that they’d been orbiting the planet, that wasn’t an expression you heard every day. It was the sort of thing reserved for events such as seeing the sun set in open air—something Soraiya would have dearly loved, but knew she would probably not live long enough for.

Soraiya turned to face the captain. She liked her; Captain Makwa usually remembered to look right at her when speaking, and she always welcomed her to the bridge with an old Anishinaabe compliment: “You’re so fat!” Which, coming from the captain with her big smile and dark eyes, never sounded like the whispers from some of the other crew that fluttered at the edge of what Soraiya could hear and couldn’t; and of course the whispers were meant to prick at her hearing loss as well as her weight. Soraiya, at 60, was long since sick of it. Most of the rotational command crew respected her ability to read the old data files, crusted in archaic monolingual constructions rather than in the current blend of the language they shared more with every new generation. But there were always some who thought it was a waste of time to study anything Prelaunch.

Soraiya cleared her throat. The air on the bridge was more stale than usual and it made her want to cough, but she made the sound mainly to get the captain’s attention. Captain Makwa looked up and faced her. Soraiya noticed that she hadn’t been looking at the blue/red/white whorls of the planet below, but rather the sensor array they used for tracking meteorites. “It’s moving,” said the captain.

Soraiya’s heart started to pound. “Evasive?” she asked, her fingers itching to engage the thrusters, which hadn’t been used since they’d manoeuvred into geosynchronous. A thousand-odd days ago.

The captain might have grinned if it were only a matter of positioning their massive hollowed-out asteroid out of the way to avoid a collision. Captain Makwa sometimes cackled at the thought of something so dangerous, but not this time. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “I think it’s coming to look for us.”

She patched over the data stream to Soraiya’s monitor. There it was: not just a tracking signal showing a tiny object headed straight for them, slowly, but a hail. Soraiya recognized the Mandarin text immediately, and the English, somewhat; the third was written in Cyrillic characters, but she had not studied Prelaunch Ukrainian much. The Mandarin had many unfamiliar phonetic characters, and the English dialect before her was very odd.

“What do you think?” asked the captain. Meaning,
Do we wake the rest of the command crew two hours early for this? And is it worth alerting all 435 people aboard?

“The ID isn’t one of the other generation ships,” said Soraiya, stalling, afraid of what the rest of the hail signified. “They’re saying they’re here to check on our ‘progress’.” Soraiya felt her throat tighten as she spoke; she knew that meant she was talking more quietly, so she forced herself to speak up, which always meant she ended up shouting. No use cursing the loss of her hearing aids; they’d been repurposed into a stethoscope when she was thirty-two, and not all the headsets on the bridge still worked. She called up a sidebar display to check some of their oldest records, and the Prelaunch dating system. She swallowed. “It says they left Earth 28 days ago.”

Captain Makwa sucked on her teeth. Soraiya always thought that made her look older than her 46 years. “They got here faster than light. I’d say that was new.”

Things might have been simpler if the captain’s rotational duty hadn’t ended before the new ship got close enough to dock. For the first time in two generations, the ship might have to halt its gravity-simulating rotation to allow the FTL craft from Earth to couple. The entire population of the asteroid they all called Home was abuzz.

Soraiya spent her off hours with friends chatting by one of the crowded observation decks, huge transparent panels beneath their feet allowing them to watch the planet as it passed by like clockwork. The population of the ship, renamed Home generations ago, had (eventually) unanimously agreed the planet they had journeyed so long to explore should be called They Are To Be Respected. The deep blues of seawater sworled into the white of clouds, the crimson and indigo vegetation seeming like swaths from a painter’s brush this far out. The planet rose and set while they watched. Before the hail from the Earth craft Soraiya had enjoyed the spark and argument of discussions over ecosystems, flora and fauna, the wonder of the smells their molecular scanners had detected at ground level and clumsily replicated in their labs. Like most aboard Home, Soraiya couldn’t bear the thought of intruding on the planet’s surface. The early days of Home’s journey, they had grown up learning, were filled with the incomplete attitude that you had to take what you needed and if you didn’t have enough, take more or take from someone else. That had worked, somewhat, as they were still mining the asteroid they travelled in for resources to sustain the journey; but when their ancestors (some of them) had begun fighting over them, there had been trouble. Murder. Strife. And, briefly, worse. But they had eventually changed their attitude, adopted a way of life that allowed them to survive in the frigid emptiness of space, and sometimes it took generations to see the best decision. Theirs was not the only way to do it, perhaps; but then they were the only generation ship that had been able to complete the journey.

They would not rush a human visit to the surface of They Are To Be Respected. Even their satellites stayed at a high enough orbit that (they hoped) indigenous life would never see them. That was, of course, at total odds with the Prelaunch goals, which Soraiya now found herself poring over, wondering less
how
the FTL craft had made the journey than
why
.

And while she was a firm believer in leaving They Are To Be Respected untouched and unsettled while they undertook a long study of it—how much of that was bound up in simply not wanting to leave Home, for all of them?—she felt more than curiosity to walk in its wildly coloured forests, rather than the clean but manufactured halls of Home, and to feel on her face the wash of sea spray in the wind, not just the comfortable, stale climate they depended on.

Now the conversations raged over what the new arrivals would look like, why they talked so differently, what news they had from Earth. The younger generation was most excited by this last part. The middle-aged and older, like Soraiya, had suddenly eager audiences for stories handed down. But in her few moments alone Soraiya stared out at They Are To Be Respected and wondered whether their practices of studying the planet from afar for the next generation were about to change.

Soraiya’s rotation was staggered from the captain’s, the better to transition from one command crew to the next, and she was relieved to note Dr. Mak’s shift did as well. She trusted his judgment, given his experience with their sporadic epidemics. But the new captain for this 40-day shift was Kenneth Rodriguez, one of the growing number of the younger generation who didn’t hold with leaving the planet below untouched while they studied it. He didn’t go so far as to suggest colonizing it, not yet, that was too radical a notion; but many felt a pull from They Are To Be Respected that went beyond mere gravity. Rodriguez’s fervour to meet with the new arrivals seemed to go beyond simple curiosity, she thought.

“Can you make sense of what they’re saying?” he barked at her in front of the rest of the bridge, assuming she just needed higher volume to understand him. You could tell someone a hundred times that wasn’t how your hearing loss worked; that you could hear quiet and loud sounds just fine, in fact very well—it was hearing anything against conversational hubbub of more than four people at once, or the white noise of their forced air system sometimes, that was impossible.

She put up a hand to signal for him to wait—and for everyone else to shut up. They almost never did, so she’d probably end up shouting. The signal from the FTL craft was strong, the words reasonably clear; it was the pronunciation and dialect that sounded foreign. It reminded her of the rigid simplicity of the old English text from early Postlaunch times, without the added Xhosa, Anishinaabe, Kirundi and Spanish metaphors and constructions they all took for granted now. It was like watching one of the uncorrupted old movies, but without subtitles. So she relied more on the automatic transcription of the incoming messages on her screen. “They’re asking permission to dock.”