Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

I hoped I’d reassured her. Destroyed by longing, I was having trouble keeping my voice level. I was afraid I sounded cold and unsympathetic—

“If we have to be fertile, what about Sista?”

I shook my head. “She’s never had a re-assignment, she couldn’t afford it. It’s all cosmetic. She’s classified as a fertile male by the Panhandle system.”

I wanted to hold her but I didn’t dare to touch her. I despised the crude thrumming in my blood, the shameful heat in my crotch. Thankfully Hilde was too intent on her confession to notice me; still convinced that she was some kind of pariah. Poor kid, hadn’t she grasped we were all pariahs together?

“You d-don’t have anything about m-my criminal record on your tablet?”

“Not a thing.”

This was absolutely true. I had professional profiles, listed qualifications for ten prisoners who were far from ordinary, including myself. Hilde was one of the four non-violent common criminals, all young women, who seemed to have been added to the mix at random: nothing recorded except their names and ages.

“Oh. All right. But, but there’s something…” She drew a breath, like someone about to dive into deep water, then jumped down and opened her locker.

I’d better go—

I couldn’t say that, it betrayed me. I tried to frame a safer exit line. Hilde climbed back into the tray where I’d imagined blood and viscera, in my own cabin, the first ‘night’. Her hands were full of slippery, shining red stuff.

I thought I was hallucinating. Her locker should be empty . All our lockers were empty; we had no material baggage.

“What—?”

“I found this,” she said. “In my locker. There’s a green one and a blue one, as well.” She was holding up a nightdress, a jewel-bright nightdress, scarlet satin with lace at the bodice and hem. “I know it shouldn’t be there, you don’t have to tell me, I understand about the transit. Ruth, please help me. What’s going on?”

We’d all had strange experiences, but nothing so incongruous, and nothing ever that two people shared. I touched the stuff; I could feel the fabric, slippery and cool. “I don’t know,” I said. “Strange things happen. Better not think about it.”

“My parents used to buy me pretty night clothes. When I was a little girl I imagined I could go to parties in my dreams, like a princess in a fairytale.” She hugged the satin as if it were a favourite doll, her eyes fixed on mine. “If anyone had asked, when I was drugged, what I most wanted to take with me, I might have said, my nightdresses, like that little girl. But why can I touch this?”

“It’s the torus. It’s messing with our minds.”

It flashed on me that the veil was getting thin, orientation was nearly over.

Hilde knelt there with her arms full of satin and lace. “I’ve never even kissed anyone,” she said. “Except my mom and dad. But I’ve had a life in my mind… I know what I want, I know you want it too. There’s no time left. Why won’t you touch me?”

“I’m thirty-seven, Hilde. You’re nineteen. You could be my daughter.”

“But I’m not.”

So there was no safe exit line, none at all. I kissed her. She kissed me back.

The texture of her hair had been a torment. The touch of her mouth, the pressure of her breasts, drenched me, drowned me. I’d had men as lovers, and they’d satisfied my itch for sex. I’d hardly ever dared to expose myself to another woman, even in outlaw circles where forbidden love was accepted. But nothing compares to the swell of a woman’s breast against my own, like to like—

There were laws against homosexuality, and the so-called genetic trait was proscribed. But you could get away with being ‘metrosexual’, as long as it was just a lifestyle choice; as long as you were just fooling around. As long as you were rich, or served the rich, and made ritual submission by lying about it, the USE would ignore most vices. I held her, and I knew she’d guessed my secret, the unforgivable crime behind my catalogue of civil disobedience. I can only love women. Only this love means anything to me, like to like. No ‘games’ of dominance and subordination that are not really games at all. No masters, no slaves, NO to all of that—

My sister, my daughter, put your red dress on. Let me find your breasts, let me suckle through the slippery satin. Undress me, take me with your mouth and with your hands, forget the past, forget who we were, why we are here. We are virgin to each other, virgins together. We can make a new heaven and a new earth, here at the last moment, on this narrow bed—

When I went back to my own cabin, I found a note on my room control message board. It was from Carpazian.

Dear Captain Ruth,

Something tells me our playtime is nearly over. When we dead awaken, if we awaken, may I respectfully request to be considered for the honour of fathering your first child. Georgiou.

I laughed until I cried.

Hilde’s bunk became a paradise, a walled garden of delight. We danced there all the ways two women can dance together, and the jewel-coloured nightdresses figured prominently, absurdly important. I didn’t care where they had come from, and I didn’t understand what Hilde had been trying to tell me.

Everyone knew, at once: the team must have been keeping watch on whose cabin I visited. I was as absurdly important as those scraps of satin. Mike and Gee came to see me. I thought they wanted to talk about pregnancy. It was a genuine issue, with all this rush of pairing-up. We didn’t know if we were still getting our prison-issue contraception, which was traditionally delivered in the drinking water. None of us women had had a period, but that didn’t mean much. They wanted to deliver a protest, or a warning. They said ‘people’ felt I ought to be careful about Hilde.

I told them my private life was my own affair

“There’s a hex on us,” said Mike, darkly. “Who’s causing it?”

“You mean the strange phenomena? How could any of us be causing them? It’s the torus. Or the Panhandle system, keeping us off balance to keep us docile.”

Gee made more sense. “She’s not clear of the drugs yet, Captain. I can tell. There’s got to be a good reason she was kept under like that.”

The hairs rose on the back of my neck; I thought of lynch-mobs.

“Yeah, sure. We’re all criminals, you two as well. But it’s over now.”

After that deputation I sent a note to Carpazian, accepting his honourable proposal, should such a time ever come, and made sure I sent it on the public channel. Maybe that was a mistake, but I was feeling a little crazy. If battlelines were drawn, the team better know that Hilde and I had allies, we didn’t stand alone.

We had a couple of very dark simulations after that, but we came out of them well. I felt that the system, my secret ally, was telling me that I could trust my girl.

The unresponsive woman woke up, and proved to be an ultra-traditional Japanese (we’d only known that she looked Japanese). She could barely speak English; but she immediately convinced us to surround ourselves with tiny rituals. Whatever we did had to be done just so . Sitting down in a chair in the dayroom was a whole tea-ceremony in itself. It was very reassuring.

Angie said to me, strange isn’t wrong , Ruth.

Miqal, the Iranian, came to my cabin. Most of them had visited me, on the quiet, at one time or another. She confessed that she was terrified of the transit itself. She had heard that when you lay down in the Buonarotti capsule you had terrible, terrible dreams. All your sins returned to you, and all the people you had betrayed. The thrum of those subliminal engines filled my head, everything disappeared. I was walking along the curving corridor again, my doppelganger at vanishing point; but the corridor was suspended in a starry void. The cold was horrific, my lungs were bursting, my body was coming apart. I could see nothing but Miqal’s eyes, mirrors of my terror—