Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (32 page)

She replied via the communicator:
The dropship is in perfect working order
.

The captain nodded curtly. Two of his crew went to retrieve the equipment they had brought to the hangar.

Soraiya felt her ears burn as she sat, for the first time in her life taking control of the dropship knowing it was not a drill—the first person on Home, ever, to do so—and her heart thumped deep in her chest. She was really doing it. She was going down to the planet. She prayed this was the right thing to do. It was reckless. But they would kill Captain Rodriguez if she didn’t. But she was so, so curious. But they didn’t know enough, yet, about the planet.

She clasped the seat harness with shaking hands. “Secure crew!” she shouted, as per routine, and flicked the dropship’s systems to life.

Normally a Home crew oversaw the opening of the launch blister doors, but that could be done remotely from the dropship under emergency protocols. She knew the contingencies.

She pulled a headset on as the captain and the others strapped themselves in. She delayed opening the exterior doors, her hand hovering above the controls and watching the Earth captain, until he secured Captain Rodriguez as well. Then she engaged, ignoring the amplified chatter in her headset from the Earth woman who had elected to be copilot. The outer doors slid open, as they had with every routine practice. Soraiya felt the same thrill she always did, that there was nothing but the emptiness of space beyond. She shook her head and instead of miming the movements over the controls, she placed her hands on the grips and set the dropship free. Out they tumbled, gently spiralling away from Home, the gravity falling away rom their bodies.

It took her longer than during the drills to snap the manouevring thrusters to life. She doublechecked all the systems. Yes, Past Captain Makwa was right. There had been some changes, even to this ship. She breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps this was the only right thing, or perhaps the best of bad choices she could make.

The Earth copilot had given up asking her questions through the headset. Soraiya saw a message from the woman flash on her screen in Mandarin.
Can you land this and get us back to our ship.

Soraiya glanced at the copilot, whose cheeks were flat and glistened with nervous sweat. What was she afraid of? Her captain? Death? Or was it something they’d left behind on Earth? Soraiya replied,
The ship is in perfect working order
.

The descent was unlike anything she had ever experienced. The copilot was an able assistant, given she was still trying to adapt to the archaic interfaces and controls, but since there was no time to type out their communication with each other she and Soraiya were essentially acting alone. The vibrating roar of atmosphere against the armoured hull felt like an interminable grind of stone on stone, as if They Are To Be Respected meant to crush them for their intrusion. Soraiya whispered a brief prayer.
Do what you must. I will protect you.

She could not spare a look away from her console to see whether Captain Rodriguez was all right, but she hoped he was. She hoped the rest of the inhabitants of Home were, as well.

The harder part, of course, was landing.

The purple-pink of the landscape, the white froth of clouds, and deep blue of the oceans rushed up to greet them frighteningly fast, and Soraiya deployed the chutes at the appropriate altitude, noting the prevailing wind at this part of the southern hemisphere matched what their satellites and scanners had indicated. As their speed decreased and the atmosphere pushed them around, she panicked. The air was so thick; it wasn’t like manouevring an exovehicle around Home at all. Keep calm, she told herself even as her knuckles whitened and the sweat on her palms made her grip on the controls slip.
Your people did not survive generations in space for you to die like this.

The impossibly high branches of pink and red trees reached up as if to grab them. The copilot yelled something through the headset until Soraiya tore it off. “Let me do this!” she shouted back. The dropship yawed as Soraiya guided what was left in the thrusters toward an opening in the forest, a deep purple swath of grass or moss. She hoped it was soft.

THUNK the craft landed with an impact that threw them against the webbing of their harnesses.

Then it was quiet.

Soraiya blinked and unbuckled herself. The Earth captain was already free of his harness and barred the way out. He barked something at her; the way her ears were ringing from the concussion of their landing, she read his lips instead. Something about suits. Protection. She shook her head. “It’s fine. We already know we can breathe down here.” With difficulty, according to their estimates and rigorous simulations.

He pulled out the circular weapon as his crew unbuckled themselves and stood. Captain Rodriguez remained in his seat but he blinked and raised his head. He grimaced as if suffering a migraine. “What—”

The Earth captain spat out another order, gesturing for Soraiya to open the door and holding his weapon ready. Trembling, she nodded. Part of her—a large part—wished he would kill her with it, so it would not be she who defiled They Are To Be Respected. But that was an evasion. She had brought them down here. She could have deliberately scuttled the dropship by fumbling the atmo entry, burned them all up before getting anywhere near the surface. Part of her hungered to step outside, and see it, breathe it, drink it in. She revelled in the pull of real gravity—they had recalibrated the rotation aboard Home upon arrival, to match what a person would feel on They Are To Be Respected, so that the younger generations would grow up ready when they decided to make planetfall. As it was, Soraiya’s joints gave her some grief. But she would take the first steps on the planet. It was more than she had ever dared dream. It felt wrong. But thrilling.

The Earth captain spoke sharply again, to her and then to his companions. They picked up packs of equipment they had brought with them.

Soraiya stepped into the small airlock and secured it. Then she opened the outer door.

The warm wind sworled in around her, playing with her hair. It was unlike the blasting air currents in the long hallways and curved corridors aboard Home; it was so random and fresh and wild. She hesitated for a moment.
I am still aboard the dropship
, she thought. That was both an excuse to stay and an impetus to leave. She stepped out and down onto the surface.

The red vegetation was a dizzying variety of tall red and purple stalks, with leaflike petals adoring the tops, the breeze whistling through them at a high enough pitch Soraiya heard it well.
What other sounds are there here?
she wondered, aching for the first time in thousands of days for her hearing aids.

She began to sneeze at something in the air, even as she marvelled at the touch of sunlight on her face. The Earth captain and his crew marched out of the dropship. Captain Rodriguez stumbled down the ramp after them. They began unpacking equipment and their captain directed them to different points of the clearing. As they took readings and called to each other on what they found, Soraiya helped Captain Rodriguez stay on his feet.

“They, they said they needed to fuel their craft to return to Earth. I said we didn’t have any of what they asked for not already tied to life support.” He blinked and sneezed as well. “Of course, there is plenty on They Are To Be Respected.”

They left much unspoken about his motives. Soraiya’s stomach was still in knots over what they had done, what they were doing right now, the sight of the Earth people already plotting and marking and measuring.

“This dropship, it’s the same as the other ones?” he asked.

Soraiya nodded. “Only difference is that it was able to get us down here.” She wondered what the Earth captain’s reaction would be, when they told him.

He marched over to them, holding out a communicator. It showed a message from Past Captain Makwa. “Earth crew have taken control of bridge. Demand safe return of Earth captain and fuel, then they will leave.”

“No one will leave,” said Soraiya to the Earth captain.

He said something, the sharp confusion clear on his face.

Soraiya gestured for the communicator, and after a moment he handed it to her. She wrote a message in Mandarin, hoping he would understand. “Our dropships are meant only to bring down, not to launch back up. We needed their thrusters for Home. And we decided that we would only land on They Are To Be Respected when They, and we, were ready. If your crew wishes to come down here, they will have to build a new dropship.”

She passed it back to him. He read it. She sneezed again, several times. Her eyes had begun to feel sticky from whatever was in the air. The Earth people didn’t seem to be as bothered by it.

The Earth captain’s face went darker as he read. Then he began shouting at her. He threw the communicator down and grabbed the front of her handed-down uniform, shaking her. Captain Rodriguez pulled one of his arms away. “What did you think?” he shouted at him, as Soraiya covered her ears. “That we would let you just come and take things away?”

The other Earth people were running to intervene, she couldn’t tell if they were shouting at her or their captain.

But she didn’t care. She stood on the surface of They Are To Be Respected. They had rations to last seven days. Beyond that, who knew? Soraiya knew some of the information Home had collected in its hundreds of days of study from orbit might bear fruit, so to speak. But she suspected they would not have enough time to learn. That might suit the Earth people, she thought darkly; they seemed to like to get things over with so quickly.

The Earth captain was pulled away from her by his crew, one of whom was shouting at him and the others demanding answers or explanations from her and Captain Rodriguez. Through the snot and sneezing and tears clogging her nose and eyes, Soraiya smiled. She would finally see the sun set in open air.

Afterword

Derek Newman-Stille

Accessible Space… the Final Frontier?

We constantly hear metaphors of disability used to describe the “problems” with the world around us: in our
crippling
economy, when we hear that our politicians are
blind
to the issues, how our interests are
lame
, how people turn a
deaf
ear to the real issues. Our media perpetually shows us tropes of disability: the self-loathing cripple, the cure narrative that solves everything, how people with disabilities just need to really try hard to not be disabled and they will become “normal” people…

Our society is perpetually creating fictions about disability, fantasies that serve its purpose, but at least Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror are clear about the fact that they are creating fictions when they deal with disability.

This is not to say that our speculative genres are free of culpability. They, like other media, are constantly reinforcing tropes that limit disability, that constrain it within a stereotypical box that marks disabled bodies as tokenistic. Science Fiction is all too inclined to find a medical cure for disabilities. Apocalyptic fiction tends to evoke the horror of the end of humanity by first showing it twisted in the form of disabled bodies. Horror relies too keenly on the idea of body horror and the disgust evoked by the thought of disability or the sight of disfigurement. Fantasy is all to inclined toward the magic cure and tends to delight in perfect, archetypal bodies.

As people with disabilities, we often look into the world and see these archetypes reflected back to us—the world telling us that our bodies are horrors, our erasure from the future since it is a “better place,” or fantasies where we can be made able-bodied with a flick of a wand with the assumption that all of us want to be able-bodied. Even our fictions erase us, contain us, and seek to expel us out of this world. So, it is beautiful when a collection like this comes along that plays with the idea that we, the disabled, are out of this world and takes us to other worlds, to futures that consider our bodies, and, most importantly, into fiction that doesn’t limit us to genre tropes.

It is too easy for most literature to project its fictions onto the disabled body. We expect it. The rest of our society lauds it (particularly when they can give an award to an able-bodied actor for playing disabled, or to an able-bodied author to really capture the suffering of the disabled protagonist). Our bodies become a site where authors can explore so many of the themes that they enjoy: the quest for a solution, the plot of “overcoming,” the character with a past that haunts them and that is etched onto their body,

We, the disabled, have always appeared in fiction, but always pushed into roles as the wise mentor for the able-bodied hero, the cautionary tale for the youthful character, the self-loathing cripple who becomes a villain because he or she wants to be able-bodied. We have always been put into narrative positions that support the protagonist, and I suppose this is why I am so excited about
Accessing the Future
, because it centres the disabled body. It puts us in the role of the heroes and it gives us the depth and breadth of experience that our lives create.

Many of us have spent our lives looking for ourselves in our fiction, projecting ourselves into the pages of our fantastic literature with the hopes of finding a resonance, but have so often been met with disappointment as our roles in that literature are constrained by our bodies, pushing us to the margins and inking over our complexity. Many of us have spent our lives asking:
Where is the braille on that space ship? Why don’t they try signing to that alien—is the whole universe really so dependent on hearing and verbal speech? Did the architecture of that space station take into account any diverse mobility concerns? Maybe someone who is not quite so neurotypical could better get into the mind of that entity?

It is time for us to CRIP the light fantastic, write ourselves into the perception of the future, to push the boundaries of expectations about our bodies, and to shift the way that disability is imagined.