Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

I used to really like to poke my fingers in the plastic wrap of those cases, because it would give a lot without breaking and make these kind of dorky dimples that looked funny, before finally it would break. Da yelled at me for wasting my time doing it once.

“But it feels good, Da,” I would say, and he would smile and say, “Yeah, sweetiepie, I guess it does, at that.” And we poked a couple in together.

So Dustin leaves the frog eggs on that little side cart thing by the kitchen table and one day about a week later Mom comes in from gardening and she’s all thirsty and what does she do? She looks around, and sees a half-full water bottle and reaches for it and takes a swig.

And there I am sitting at the table, eating some microwave shrimp dinner or something, and I’m in a hurry because I have to go to a soccer game.

Mom turns to tell me probably to hurry up or we’ll be late.

She realizes her mouth is full of water.

Then she realizes what’s in that water.

Spew!

Week-old frog egg water all over the side of my face, in my hair, on my jersey sleeve, in the macaroni and shrimp. And there’s even some of it on the fork that’s just going into my mouth. Frog water—and into my mouth before I can stop it.

Disgusting!

I spit out the frog water shrimp and macaroni on the plate. Meanwhile, Mom runs over to the sink and gags, trying to throw up, but she can’t get herself to.

And I, I remember, I went over there too, and I couldn’t help it, and I shouldn’t have done what I did next, because I was just as grossed out as she was, but I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

And she turned and looked at me so hurt, that I would laugh at her at a time like that. She didn’t say anything, but I’ll never forget that look she gave me.

And I felt really bad and started to cry, “Sorry, Mommy. Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Because I still called her that sometimes back then, “Mommy.”

And then Mom smiled. Everything was all right.

Except that she went ahead and threw up right then and there into the sink, of course. After all, she’d drunk a huge swallow of frog egg water.

I was ten at the time. It was not long before that night with the glowing light, and the bad dream, and the next thing I know I woke up in the crèche, and then there was Aleria hunched over me, staring at me with those eye stalks of hers.

But back to the frog water: the smell of it hit us both. It was on me, and it was rancid. And we both started to gag and laugh, and Mom helped me clean up real quick, and she brushed her teeth and gargled with some old mouthwash she found under the bathroom cabinet, Tangerine or Listerane or something, I can’t remember, and we made it to the soccer game just in time. But I had to keep the same jersey on since I only had the one, and I smelled that gag-me frog water smell the whole time and it made me so mad I scored a goal and took another girl out with a slide tackle when I was on defense and got yellow-carded and almost thrown out. Anyway, we won that time, and all the other girls jumped on me, and high-fived me for playing so good. And I forgot all about the frog water after that. Until now.

The slop wand goo had been in storage probably for years, and, like everything else on Aleria’s ship, was kind of stale smelling or tasting.

I dried myself off with a towel that came out of another maker-bump from the ship wall. You have to dry yourself off in zero g. Any liquid that’s water-based will stick to you like a layer of paste or cooking oil or something, and it won’t just run off, because there’s no “down” for it to run toward. I gave the wet towel to a disposal tube, which sucked it down.

“Space or recycle?” asked the ship.

“Recycle,” I answered.

There wasn’t any reason to throw the thing away, even though interstellar space was pretty empty and could use maybe a towel floating out there between stars to give it some character.

After Aleria had detached herself from my legs, she slid over to her resting globe. It was kind of like a chair for Aleria, and it floated in the exact middle of the bridge pod. It was held in place by magnets or some kind of forcefield thing like that, because if you tried to move the globe from the center, it would pop back into position. It had an opening on one side, so Aleria, who didn’t have any skeleton or exoskeleton at all, could slide into there like a, say, one of those sea slugs from the Science Channel, and bunch up in a ball. This was relaxing to Aleria’s type, the Meebs. I’d never met any others, but she’d had me watch plenty of videos.

“You’ll be meeting them soon, after all,” she said. “Your new brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. By the time we arrive, you’ll really be looking forward to it.”

So there she sat in the middle of the bridge pod. This was what I called the room, anyway. It was oval shaped, like an egg. There wasn’t really any floor or ceiling, just a wall, because this was zero g. The resting globe was clear and it looked like one of those terrariums I used to see in Pet Mart or whatever that place was called. I guess the globe ones were supposed to look cool. They sat on a stand and you put turtles or frogs or whatever air breathing stuff in them. Dustin and I only ever had gold fish.

Thinking about Dustin made me whimper a little. I guess it was pretty loud. I didn’t cry anymore, but I couldn’t help sometimes letting out something like that. I hated it when I did. I hated to let Aleria know anything about how I was really feeling. She was going to own my thoughts and feelings pretty soon, and I wanted to keep them for myself as long as I could before that happened.

“Honey, won’t you tell me what’s the matter?” said the voice from the ship’s speakers. This was Aleria talking. The regular ship voice was just a voice, maybe a woman, maybe a man. Gray, like everything else here. But Aleria’s voice was all honey-sweet. She kind of sounded like when Da would do the helium breath voice at my and Dustin’s birthday parties, but full of “oohs,” and “aahs,” and “dears” and “darlings.”

She didn’t have a real voice, of course. She was a blob, not a human. She talked to the ship the way her kind did—through chemical packets that she kind of flicked at the walls, where they were absorbed. I thought of them as booger-filled snot. The ship then translated the packets and spoke in the made-up voice it had for her.

“The nodes are hurting me inside,” I said. Which was true. The implants, which she’d put into me, were growing inside my muscles and would one day take over all of me, did hurt. This was an always and forever ache, and I didn’t let it affect me anymore. But it was a good excuse.

“I’m sorry, Megan, but one day the pain will be gone, I promise.”

“And I’ll be like you.”

“You’ll be part of me,” Aleria said. “I’ll hug you really tight, and we’ll be together forever.”

You’re not my mother, I thought. My mother is ten thousand light-years behind me.

I didn’t really care about what the change was doing to my body that much. Oh, I did a little. But one day my thoughts were not going to be my own. That was what I really hated, hated, hated.

One day, all my memories of Mom, Da, Dustin and the rest would belong to Aleria. And I knew what she’d do with them, all right. She was jealous. She would keep the knowledge, but wipe the love away. She wanted me all for herself.

“Darling, you’re so sweet, I need another sip of you,” Aleria said through the ship speaker. “Bring the conditioner over and bathe me, there’s a good girl.”

The ship wall made a faucet. That was the only way I could think to describe it. You squeezed the outside of the faucet like maybe you would milk a cow—even though I never milked a cow in my life, we lived in the suburbs—and this kind of gloppy sausage filling stuff would come out. It was some kind of enzyme that softened up Aleria’s membrane artificially so she could feed again without having to wait her normal period, which could be a couple of hours. I caught the glop in a balloon bag, then pinched the balloon closed, and slid the end from the faucet. There was another maker-cone thingie nearby, more or less permanent, for water. I put the lip of the balloon over this one and squeezed out some water to mix with the enzyme-glop inside the balloon.