She Walks in Shadows (36 page)

“Mine doesn’t override my most important decisions.”

His smile capsizes into an aborted chuckle. “No, I don’t imagine anyone overrides you much, Doctor, in any matter. I do apologize terribly.”

I gesture at the door. “You don’t plan to apply again.”

This time, his laughter is clear and true, the brittle brightness of it seeming to scatter the shadows for a moment. They resolve, leaving us both again in neon saturation and high-contrast blots. “No, I don’t think I will. This time, I am very sure — I won’t blight your door or vision again. This has been an education.”

Educational, though I can’t imagine what lesson he’s learned other than that he is an indecisive, overgrown child. Back in my office, I peel a cigarette from its case. Fragile, half the circumference of my thumb, rolled in scrap fiberplast: my only vice, whose rarity and price alone save me from self-destruction. The stench always staggers as the fiberplast singes without combusting. The same stench in my mouth, throat, lungs. My supplier adds the occasional pinch of hallucinogen for a charge, quick-acting, one part chemical and one part interfacing with implants. The mildest: I can’t afford stronger and have no wish to become dependent, though I hear the most expensive sort can give you an extensive alternate life. When I lean back, the low ceiling warps and bucks, smoke turning to claws. The desk softens to leathery flesh, the floor to pulsating quicksand. A gravitational peace, as of sinking.

Habit makes me flick on a monitoring channel for the womb-beat to accompany me into chemical haze. A quarter of the chambers down there are occupied by embryos in various states of gestation, tadpoles with frenzied hearts. The lottery is meant to treat all applicants equally, but in reality, it’s of course more than luck. Fitness to parent. Relative wealth. Politics. Even the range of available genetic material differs; not all options are accessible to applicants with lesser claims.

I don’t see the chambers in person often and have watched the decantation process just twice. The most alien moment of our existence: newly born infants are so animal when they first howl, so strangely inhuman when they are calm. It’s better after they are cleaned — watching them emerge from amniotic fluids has always unsettled me — but even then, the nursery is full of small, inscrutable creatures with amorphous minds undefined by thought or geometry. Once, our forebears integrated behavioral modules into the uteral chamber to prime for socialization and language, but that piece of civilization has been sacrificed for survival. Like so much else. Soon, even the hothouse will go: It’s long been thought of as more decorative than efficient, that one spot of color in all the station, and food will turn to nutritional efficiency rather than things with crunch and flavor.

There must be more than the endless din, the susurrus of salt, the shadow of Prathayayi that spares nothing. But if that exists, a possibility of a condition beyond the decay we know, it, too, has been lost.

When I flex my hand, webbing tautens wet and green between my fingers. A byproduct of the cigarette and a recurrent fantasy — half-subconscious, half-intent. Sometimes, I dream of the tank breaking, the corridors filling, and all of us turning to scales and fins. The babies spreading their limbs in starfish metamorphosis, infant fat shedding and gums hardening in their mouths, tiny fingers and thumbs replaced by eyes. An easy existence severed from endocrine burden, an echinoderm bliss without future or past.

The comedown is rarely predictable. As often excruciating as exquisite, this time barely a ripple, so much so that when the alarm trespasses on my vision, I mistake it for a drugged residue. There are still fins on my throat and my table is still half-submerged, sodden with seaweed. I know it’s not real because the hallucination goes only so far; I smell nothing but office damp and nicotine cocktail. The alarm seems distant.

That pleasant languor eventually breaks, timed toward the end of my shift. Monitoring channels lets me know that nothing amiss happened — that trespassing notification was a glitch, after all. To be conscientious, I run an inventory check. Supplies fine, womb-chambers calibrated, no sensor tripped.

Habit again, on the way out, to look on Prathayayi. Always the same, larger than life. In the crèche, we can only see one part of her at a time: a lineless finger pressed against a window, a black cheek under a floor tile, wrist curving along a corridor. The side of a breast pressed against the shell of the maintenance hub, luminescent.

The fable of sightless hermits groping to tell the shape of an elephant and so we are.

When the first death happens, I don’t hear of it until the autopsy.

People die all the time on the station, some easier and quicker than others. We all live badly, in poverty of flesh and spirit, but in the segment furthest from the crèche and Prathayayi’s pulse, they live poorer than most. An officer asking me in comes as a surprise.

The Inspector has no use for preamble. “The deceased recently applied for a crèche license.”

I glance at the profile she sent me, displayed in the corner of my vision. “He requested entry into the lottery, then withdrew before the results.”

“I’d like to show you what his body is like. It’s rather shocking, but your opinion would be of value.”

“I’ve seen shocking,” I say, without thinking but not untrue. Being alive is shocking.

When I last saw the deceased, he was losing his hair, middle-aged and skin cut close to the bone. He’d gained some flesh since. While I’d hardly call his state sanguineous, there’s a radiance to his face that one associates with good health. Clear, supple skin, lustrous hair, features lax in repose.

The rest of him inspires a less-hopeful prognosis. He lies on the slab in a state of disassembly, severed limbs cleaned and laid out like spare parts. More parts than can be accounted for one body and some of them the wrong size. A small, stumpy leg. A tiny foot the size of a cowrie shell, as though his vivisection had been mixed up with that of a doll. “What are those?”

“They were inside him. A fetus in third-trimester development. Or rather,” the Inspector corrects herself, “parts of a fetus. As though he was pregnant, but, since he lacked a uterus, the fetus was ... distributed.”

“That’s a
very
silly idea, Inspector.”

“So it is. You work at the crèche,” she says, as though the crèche is a secret temple where impossible sorcery and unlikely biology occur. “You’d have a better idea of what might have happened than I do.”

I try to make out whether she’s being sarcastic or engaging in some strange interrogation technique. “I really don’t, Inspector. The rare times we’ve approved manual birth, we first make sure the bearer is equipped for it. If I must stage a guess, an unlicensed surgeon and an implant-gone-wrong seem much likelier.” I sketch in the air, no shape in particular but a gesture that, to the layperson, seems erudite. “To keep his youth or what else, who knows? It was certainly not going to get him a baby.”

She lets me go: The Inspector doesn’t seriously believe me a suspect — the crèche logs would corroborate my assertions and I lack either motive or means — but she seems disappointed that her only lead has no better to offer than dry speculation. In any case, none of it has much to do with me. A freak death of a freak condition; it happens to other people and not even in the vicinity of where I work or live.

Back in the office, I meet with a colleague and we discuss the matter briefly, the way we would handle gossip. None of us spares any great feeling for rejected applicants, united in a remote disdain for those desperate to parent. To add to the load of the station, to test the survival coefficient.

Schedule clear for the rest of my shift, I seek solace in another cigarette. This time, I remember little of what I see, though I retain the impression of headless newborns crawling and struggling to assemble themselves.

When lucidity returns, I find myself among the chambers.

No panic: My senses are still drug-glazed and everything shimmers in high contrast, the blackened metal of womb-capsules, the eye of Prathayayi. We’ll never know why the station planners put this room here, directly facing that half-lidded eye. A scleral well without pupil, reflecting nothing. Not the wombs, the lights, not myself. Before this gaze, nothing exists.

A seam in the glass that I wouldn’t have noticed without the hyper-focus of the comedown. The outline of it suggests a panel cut out and welded back in place with intricate care, the work of hours. When I press my ear to it, I almost expect a submerged, gurgling voice. All I hear is my cardiac meter reverberating back, seismic.

I recall the last time security logged an alarm. The hour is about right. There’s a risk I am wrong, but I’ll take it. My request is answered in the affirmative.

Kittisak’s shadow precedes him, distorted, but coming into view, it is more than just his shadow. He totters as though carrying an unfamiliar weight. The bloat on him has nothing to do with muscle growth or bad diet run amok — distributed fetal development, the Inspector half-joked. He kneels by the spot I pressed my ear to ten minutes ago, breathing onto the glass. Mesmerized.

“Khun Kittisak.”

As before, his breath catches and he freezes, electrified by his own guilt. “Doctor,” he begins, “I can explain this.”

“Which part can you explain? That you’ve been sneaking in here, or that mysterious and — apparently — fatal condition?”

“Those who deserve her gift safely carry to term.”

I glance sideway at the immense, inert eye. “Yes,” I say mildly, “that sounds very sane.”

“This is how we were meant to be and our children will live forever.” He sweeps his arms outward. “There’s no sunlight here; do you see? We need only to make. We need only to break the glass. The perfect seedbed in which the next Y’ha-nthlei must inevitably flower, in which
we
will be reborn.”

“I have no idea what you just said.” Nor was I aware the human throat could pronounce those sounds. “Attempting to reproduce without a license is illegal, Khun Kittisak.”

“You don’t
understand
, Doctor. I’m in total control of my faculties. If you listen and pay attention, you can hear her too. You would see.”

A gun emerges from his hand, its passage smooth as an egg’s. His aim drifts low, meant to wound, slow to squeeze the trigger as though he has all the time in the world. And against me, he does. Maybe he plans to explain himself while I bleed, persuade me to his viewpoint over the aria of my pain.

Unlike me, the Inspector is armed; unlike him, she does not hesitate, is quick to fire, and interested in no rhetoric save that of the bullet.

He goes down, a rupturing of more than just flesh, more than his own. A fetal arm or hand, maybe even a head. When the Inspector’s subordinates take him away, he is weeping, clutching at the tiny limb dangling from his open wound. Numb to the pain but vulnerable to the grief. When they operate on him, I wonder how many they will find, those parasites attached to that willing host.

I stay behind, as does the Inspector. She commends me for my intuition and quickness of wit; I pay her only half my attention, the other half drawn to the wombs. But they remain as they are, ordinary and in order, much as the carcass is. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. We march inexorably toward a certain end.

A silhouette that evokes my cigarette haze, for a moment, one of the fetuses seems finned and scaled, a sleek tail curled in on itself.

“Doctor? Is there something wrong?”

In the tank, that shadow has vanished.

“No, Inspector,” I say quietly. “Everything is just fine.”

T’LA-YUB’S HEAD

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

Translated by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

THE FIRST THING
that rematerialized was her head, vomiting with a death rattle. Then, as she regained her breath, her arched body began to appear. Slowly, the luminous vapor she seemed made of, turned into flesh until it collapsed on the floor. The long black hairs, drenched in vomit and sweat, adhered to her face painted red and black.