SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

I could give you something more, something fuller, richer.

I only want release. I want peace.

Do you love me, Kata?

You’re a parasite. I’m a mere host. How can you ask that question?

You are more than a host. You are my eyes to the stars, my ears to the music of the spheres. You are my heartbeat and my food, you are my breath. Do you love me?

Yes.

Afterward, I sleep and do not dream.

When I awake, I’m hungry. It’s a sensation I haven’t felt in a long time. The cycle has begun again as it has hundreds of times before, but this time something is different. The life in my womb is growing and changing. It’s ready to be born, to emerge from this shell of a body, this swollen belly that has housed it and nourished it for far too long. It needs to be fed, more than what I can give. I think of the crewmen who’ve died in the past twenty years, whose internal parts could sustain me if I had them now. Space has devoured them instead.

I shower, lingering under the hot spray a little longer than usual. Afterward as I dry off, I study my image in the reflective surface of my bedroom wall. I notice how much I’ve changed. All my body hair is gone, including my eyebrows and lashes. My eyes bulge slightly, as if too big for their sockets. Over time, he’s replaced my blood with a blue fluid, and it gives me a deathly tint, the color of a body pulled from icy waters. My skin is translucent, but also coarse and leathery. I look as though I could crumble at the slightest touch. But I’m stronger than ever. I’m impenetrable. The irony of that is not lost on me.

I don’t bother to dress. No one but the cold, impartial observer in the ceiling sees me, and the freedom of nakedness is one of the few small pleasures I can enjoy.

Ruhan comes with breakfast. “Did you sleep well, Kata?”

“No,” I reply. “I had bad dreams.”

“Tell me about them.” The speaker crackles. I’m sure after so many years it’s beginning to break down. The crewmen are nothing more than maintenance men, but they are few now, and there are priorities. Speakers are likely at the bottom of the list. I’m only grateful that Ruhan still comes to me, that he found a way to visit mostly unhindered. He’s never told me how it happened, what arrangement he made with the crew, or what threat he may have held over their heads. Ruhan doesn’t seem like a strong man, but I think he wears it as a disguise. I think—after the beating, after the long year passing—he took that disguise off and showed the crew who he really was.

The speaker hisses. I remember my loneliness without Ruhan’s conversations, and a tiny spark of panic flares in my chest at the thought of another long, empty stretch with no communication. But it passes.

“I dreamt that I was in the steel coffin, the one they put me in to try and kill me.”

“Ah, yes. A long time ago. When did you say?”

“I don’t remember exactly. I’ve tried to forget over the years. I think it was sometime in the mid-twentieth century, maybe around 1960.”

“You have that dream a lot.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t think of a worse way to die.”

I have to laugh at that.

Ruhan laughs with me, but he seems puzzled. “What’s so funny?”

“You don’t see?” I reply. “It is the way you will die. You’re in a box, sealed in, cast out into the vast ocean of space, with no control over where the ship goes or what your end will be.”

Ruhan is silent for so long I think he might have left. Then he says, “It’s not so bad, I guess. It’s different than a steel coffin. I can breathe.”

“You can breathe,” I say. “Yes, there’s that.”

He changes the subject. “CL6 won’t make it much longer. He had a stroke yesterday. That means just four of us now.”

His news means nothing to me. CL6 is a number. I’ve never seen him. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard his voice. Ruhan only mentions him in passing. But I think about his death, of the possibilities it might offer me.

“Will you do it this time?” I ask.

Ruhan knows what I want. “I can’t,” he says. “You know I can’t.”

“Just the pancreas, the liver and the thyroid glands. That’s all I ask. Is it so much from a man who will end up ejected into space? What difference will it make to a dead man?” There’s a desperate tone to my voice. I don’t want Ruhan to hear it, but I am desperate, and I need the organs. The life in me needs to be fed again.

“They’d never allow it,” he says. “They might kill me if they found out. They’re scared of you, Kata.”

“Aren’t they scared of you ?”

“Not enough. Not anymore. But you…it’s different with you.”

“They have every right to be scared of me.”

I hear Ruhan’s shallow breathing. “Would you kill us and eat us if you could?” he asks.

I want to say no, but I can’t. “It’s out of my control, Ruhan. He’s like a demon possessing me. I do whatever he wants.”

Ruhan thinks about this. “My abuela believed in demons.”

“Did your grandmother believe in aliens?”

“She believed in everything,” he says, then tries to change the subject. “Have you named it? The thing in your belly.”

He doesn’t want me to push about the organs, because it frightens him. So I let I go. “I call him the wasp.”

“No shit? What kind of name is that?”

“It’s not a name. Just a label.”

I tell him another story, one I haven’t shared before. “Once, sometime around the early 1800s, I broke into a house. I’d been wandering in the wilderness for months, maybe even years. Time gets lost when you live so long. The natives there kept me fed and covered by making me offerings of animals and furs so I would stay away from their villages. They called me the River Witch. Sometimes Red Boar.

“I needed real clothes, something more than furs. I’d been watching this particular homestead—a woman lived there with her husband and three young sons. She was similar to me in size and build. So one day, when they’d gone to town, I broke in and took one of her dresses and a blanket.

“I allowed myself a moment to explore the house. It had been so long since I’d been inside one. The house was small but cozy. I noticed a small stack of books on a table—children’s books. One was about insects, with pictures carefully detailed and colored. There was a wasp with indigo wings, which I read about…it laid its eggs inside living beetle grubs.

“This was a revelation to me. For the first time I had some way to identify what had happened to me, no matter how grotesque the comparison. I hadn’t become pregnant, as I’d shamefully believed all those years. No, I was the captive host to this creature, a slave to his whims while I nourished his offspring with my body. The alien I encountered was humanoid; in fact, there was nothing about him I would define as insect. But what he did to me was very much like the wasp in that book. So I called him a wasp after that. It seemed most appropriate.”

Ruhan lets out a low whistle. “ Jesus. ”

There seems no good reason to hold back anything anymore. “He was stranded,” I continue. “Wounded. Abandoned. Dying. His ship would never again break the chains of Earth’s gravity. And so he waited for the time when Earth developed the technology to travel into deep space. Nine hundred years. He’s on his way home.”

Somewhere, out in the vast reaches of space, we’re drawing closer to what’s familiar to him. It’s an exchange, of sorts, between us, and also something we share. Against his will the wasp gave up his familiar home for an alien one; and now, ironically, I find myself doing the same. A slave to the will of one who could no longer direct his own fate.