Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

When I took the balloon off the water maker-cone, a few drops of water escaped. Water drops didn’t just float off into space like you might think. They were still touching my hand, and water has this weird surface tension. In zero g it will stick to you. I remember when we had toast for breakfast and I would get some strawberry jelly on my hands and you couldn’t wipe it off with a napkin and even if you licked your fingers—gross!—that jelly-slimy feeling would still be there until you gave your hands a good washing.

Water does that in zero g. A thin coat will stick to you no matter how hard you shake your hand or whatever to get it off. The only way to get rid of it is to find something absorbent and let that soak it up. I wiped these water drops on the side of my pants. I wear these kind of gray pajama top and bottoms made out of some kind of thin material. I don’t know what they’re made of, but I’m pretty sure they aren’t one hundred percent cotton. They fit me okay, but I’ve been growing a lot lately and my wrists and ankles are starting to stick way out.

Anyway, I kept the balloon pinched off and then sloshed around the water and enzyme goop solution inside, mixing it. After a while, it started to make a solution with no lumps. That was the way Aleria liked it. Absolutely no lumps. I kicked off from the wall and floated over to Aleria’s globe. She was packed in there pretty good, but a couple of pseudopods were sticking out, drifting kind of lazily around. There was a holding strap attached to the globe especially for me, so I hooked in with a foot and kind of bent myself around the globe. I’d gotten really good at swimming in zero g. If there was zero g soccer, I was sure I’d be good enough to score goals.

I squeezed the conditioning solution into the top of the tank. It hung onto Aleria’s outer membrane the same way water clung to my skin. I spread it around. A little stream of snot-talk shot out from her and right by my face. I heard it splat, soft-like, into the ship wall.

“Wonderful,” said the wall speaker. “That’s it. Rub it in. Get me soft, dear.”

I remembered getting hugged by Mom. The hug I used the most was the big one she gave me when I was finally starting to get okay grades on my language art quizzes. I was kind of slow learning to read—I was still on second grade books when I was already in third grade—but then one day in fourth grade, it just seemed a lot easier. And Mom was this big reader—she always had a book around—and she wanted us to share that, liking books and all. We never really got a chance.

I used that hug a lot, though.

I spread on the rest of the conditioner. I reached into the tank and kind of kneaded her like a giant ball of Play-doh. She could squeeze up real tight, about the size of a basketball, when she wanted to.

“Careful, careful, child,” said the wall. “Not too much on the underside. I’ll turn blue.”

Aleria was kind of a clear color, but not see-through. She looked like gloppy Elmer’s glue if it had dark chunks floating around in it like Aleria’s organs and nodules and stuff did.

“Why will you turn blue, Aleria?” I asked,

“I do wish you’d call me Mother, as we discussed.”

“Why will you turn blue, Mother?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I never was much of a chemist. My specialty is scouting, as you know. But you humans and we Meebs do need oxygen in about the same amounts. That’s why I picked you out at the crèche, of course. You and I can share the same atmosphere.”

The crèche, I thought with a shudder. It was a collection station, staffed by Meeb robots. I only found that out later.

One day I went to sleep in my room. Mine was the one over the garage. It was farther from Mom and Da’s bedroom that Dustin’s was, but it was a little bigger than his. Mom and I painted it up with peace signs and flowers and stuff.

I dreamed about a bright light.

And when I woke up, I wasn’t in my room anymore. I was in a cage.

There were other people in there with me from all different parts of the world, like India and Australia and China and like that. Some were kids, some were adults. It was like this white room we couldn’t see the walls of, but we couldn’t get out of. I was the youngest.

What none of us knew what that we were in a Pet Mart. I mean, an alien Pet Mart.

I used to love going to Pet Mart. I really liked watching those cuddly looking chinchillas, and the cute little mice running around and around to nowhere in those wheels of theirs. I liked it when they grabbed the wheels and took a ride around and around for a few turns. It made you think that they weren’t completely stupid, and kind of knew what they were doing.

Or no. The crèche was not like the pet store. It was lots worse. Because I knew now what it meant to be picked out at the crèche. To be the one who gets selected by that floating glob outside the cage window.

Kind of like a pet store crossed with a grocery store. That was maybe the closest way of looking at it. Kind of, but not really.

The ones Aleria didn’t pick out of her trap got recycled, of course. Aleria was very big on a recycling.

I emptied the rest of the balloon then kicked over to the disposal. I stuck my hand into the blister orifice and let it suck away the used balloon skin. The reason the disposal blister didn’t suck me away was because of the mechs in my skin. They got pinged and identified me, my body, as “keep.” The disposal unit then asked the question it always asked.

“Space or recycle?”

“Recycle,” I answered.

And that was all there was to it. The blister didn’t care; it just needed the answer to follow its programming. The ship might be an artificial intelligence of some sort, but it sure wasn’t any kind of genius.

I pushed off and went back to Aleria. She was conditioned now. All her pseudopods were retracted which I knew meant she was waiting expectantly. It was time.

I stuck my hands into the globe, into the main opening, and stuck them into her, pushing into her gooey flesh. The outside of her dimpled for a ways, like the plastic wrap on those cases of water bottles did, then it gave away completely, and my hands and arms were within the milky glop that floated inside Aleria, that was Aleria.

A stream of her speech-mucus twisted past me. It hit the walls and got absorbed and translated.

“Aaah,” the wall speaker sighed. “That’s it. Deeper, deeper.”

I plunged in up to my shoulders. I felt the goo of her surround my arms. And then I felt the prickles where she broke the skin and where parts of her slid inside me .

She wasn’t just feeding on me, she was changing me. Changing me into more of her. One day, when the nodules she left inside me reached maturity, I would be “ripe,” and she would be able to absorb me completely. We would be one.

“My youth will be restored, darling, and your youth will last forever.”

She never told me exactly how the process worked. “I’m not a biologist, dear. I’m a scout,” was her only reply when I asked. But I knew a lot more about Meebs now that I’d been on the ship for a year and seen the videos. At least I thought it was a year I’d been here. I figured I was about the size of an eleven-year-old, even though there were no mirrors, and if there had been, I would have avoided them. I hadn’t seen myself in a long time. I was kind of afraid to look, afraid to see what the mechs had done to my face. My skin was as gray as my pajamas. But at least, with the mechs in it, it was kind of shiny.

I pushed into Aleria as deep as I could, because I knew if I didn’t, she would demand it of me anyway.

“Is that good, Mother?”

“You have no idea, dear. Replenishment is the greatest pleasure in life, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”