Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

When I had enough length, I pushed off. I let the water hose trail out behind me as I sailed across the room.

Aleria had flowed out of the globe and pushed off a way, like a couple of yard sticks away. She was beginning her after-feed stretch. I needed to catch her before she spread out to her full size. At the moment, she was about the size of one of those big rubbery exercise balls like Mom used to have. A Pilamies ball, or something like that.

Aleria extended a sensing stalk in time to notice what I was doing.

“Darling daughter, I said to bring a towel, not more water, now please—”

“Stop calling me that,” I said. My voice was sort of a growl and it surprised even me. I’d never made that mean a sound before. “I’m not your child, and you’re not my mother.”

I reached the end of my tether, the water tube. With a squeeze of my hands around the tube’s end—the end looked kind of a like the tip of an elephant trunk—I opened the spigot and let the water flow. There was back pressure behind it, and out the water came.

Water doesn’t flow in zero g the way it does in gravity. Even before Aleria took me, I knew about zero g. I had seen Youtube videos from space shuttles and the space station and stuff in science class at school. But the one thing I had never seen was what water does when it meets something floating in zero g.

It clings.

It jiggles like crazy, but it won’t come off.

You can’t shake it off. You can shake off a few droplets, but if there is enough of it, it isn’t going anywhere no matter what you do. Without something to absorb it and overcome that surface tension, water sticks like glue.

It sticks like frog egg glop does to frog eggs, the gunk that holds the eggs together in a big clump. All for one. One for all.

In the creek, or in some little kid’s water bottle.

Living or dead.

For a second, it seemed like Aleria thought I was trying to do something nice for her, something extra. She paused there, floating, out of the globe and maybe a yard or two away from it, but not completely expanded yet. She let me bathe her. And then I bathed the other side of her. I bathed her all over.

And I kept the spigot open. It’s pretty simple. You squeeze the orifice and it relaxes some kind of stopper on the end.

And when she tried to move, to ooze outward, the water went with her.

I squeezed the spigot open, and then the bubble of water around her expanded. She was inside it, like a milky-white pit. It was jiggling around her, but it wouldn’t come off.

I remembered those frog eggs.

Oh, she struggled. She twisted and turned. On her own, all the squirming would have gotten her to a wall, certainly. If she’d been by herself in the ship, she would have had a scare, but even her random motion would probably have saved her, allowed her to intersect with a hard surface, an extended piece of the bridge pod, anything. And then one of her pseudopods would have been able to find a footing, pull herself free from the coating of water.

But I was here now.

I was careful and alert, like the teachers always wanted us to be during carpool pickup. I circled Aleria with the water hose. I used pressure from the water tube hose for flying around fast, and the strap holds the ship had grown for me all around the wall for anchoring myself when I needed to. The moment Aleria looked like she was drifting close to a wall, I sent a stream of water toward her to push her away. I hadn’t spent a year in zero g for nothing; I had a feel for how to do this now.

I kept her away from the pod walls, all of them. I held her away from saving herself.

Inside the ball of water, I saw the shooting snot, the little chemical speaking packets, dart out into the liquid. But they couldn’t escape. The water tension held them in. Her words of command couldn’t get to the ship wall and receive activation.

Frog glop , I thought. Frog water.

I had to smile.

She couldn’t turn off the water.

She couldn’t tell the ship to save her.

She couldn’t even scream.

I watched her in that frog water. She turned from milky white to blue. And when she was blue, I saw something else she was doing. She was forming a picture on the surface of her membrane.

Not fair.

It was Mom. Her face. Frowning, the way she’d looked when I hurt her feelings. After she drank the frog water and was gagging over the kitchen sink and I was laughing at her.

Aleria had stolen enough of me to show me that.

But I’m eleven. I know real from fake.

I kept on laughing.

I mean, she was a blob in a quivery, jiggly coating of froggy, jumpy water. It was the water I was laughing at, the way it moved.

I kept on laughing while Aleria went from blue to green and from green to brown.

She stayed brown.

My laugh turned into a kind of a chuckle, then a wheezing kind of thing, and then it felt like it was going to turn into crying. I didn’t want that, so I stopped as quickly as I’d started and held it all in. After that, I stared at Aleria for a long, long time.

She drowned—suspended in a quivering coating of water, only a few meters from safety. A dead blob in frog water.

When I finally spoke, it was a whisper. “Is Aleria dead, ship?”

“Affirmative. Captain Aleria is dead.” The voice was neutral. No feeling. Gray. And it was a huge relief to hear after Aleria’s honey-sweet Mother voice. I could go with gray for now.

Of course I didn’t take the ship’s word for it, not entirely. Like I said, the ship wasn’t the brightest brain in the universe. No, I left Aleria floating there for another light cycle. When I woke up from a tired, restless sleep, she hadn’t wiggled free. Hadn’t somehow come back to life. There she hung.

Aleria was dead. I made double sure of it by expelling her remains via the disposal unit.

“Space or recycle?” asked the ship.

You can guess the answer I gave.

I ate. The stuff the ship fed me through a food maker-bump was gray and didn’t taste like much, but it kept me alive.

It was time to have a serious talk with the ship.

I went to the bridge. There were still lots of gobs of water hanging around. I hadn’t managed to suck the place dry yet. Floating around there felt a little like walking in that misty stuff when Da took us on the hike up to that overlook one time. I couldn’t remember the name of the place. Mount Overlook or something like that, but I knew that couldn’t be the right name. Who would call a mountain Mount Overlook? I wished, like I always wished, that I had been paying better attention.

That’s okay. I was just a kid , I thought.

And then I realized I wasn’t anymore. Not now.

So I was all ready to have an argument with ship, for it to be a struggle. The truth was I was expecting to have to figure out some way to sabotage the vessel if I had to. There was no way we were going to the Meeb system. I’d blow us up first.

“Ship,” I said. “We need to talk.”

And the ship answered in its neutral, gray tone with maybe the sweetest words I’ve ever heard.

“Yes, Captain Aleria, how may I serve you?”

“But ship, you know Aleria is dead. You said she was dead yourself.”

“Speaker mech signal identifies as Captain Aleria,” the ship replied. “Previous reading has been discarded.”

I sighed, and felt the tightness and a little bit of the scared-ness and terrified-ness leak out of me.

And then, I think I started to cry. And I let myself. Just a little. My face was already wet, with all that mist in the air. When I first woke up in the crèche trap and then when Aleria took me on board her ship, I had cried a lot. But then I stopped, and I hadn’t for a long, long time. Maybe this was because tears are hard to deal with in zero g. They kind of stick to your eyes when you don’t wipe them and make little globs. They don’t run down your face and they don’t go away. In zero g, you have to do something about tears or they’ll just, you know, stay .