Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Read online

  Isaiah was so astonished that he set his cup down too hard, sloshing the contents onto the table. “What made you say that?”

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? We’re getting ready to graduate. Who knows where we’ll find work. The odds are pretty low we’ll be in the same place, so I thought—”

  “I’m not from here.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not from here. I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time.”

  Ellie ran her fingertip around the rim of her coffee cup. “Not from New York, you mean? I thought you grew up in Park Slope.”

  “I did,” Isaiah said. “I’ve lived here all of—Isaiah’s—life. But I’m actually from somewhere else.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I’m an alien. Not the kind from another country. From another—place. Only, not a place like here, but more like a place in time—or space.”

  He was confusing her—he could see from the frown on her face and the flush creeping up her neck.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “The—place—where I’m from doesn’t exist as matter, the way things exist here. The collective is more like an energy conduit, with individuals who function together—”

  “Stop. You’re starting to scare me, Isaiah. Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s important that you know everything,” he said, meeting her gaze. “That’s what couples do, isn’t it? Clean out any skeletons in their closets?”

  It wasn’t the right metaphor, but his heart was hammering in his chest in an alarming way and he was afraid that Ellie would take flight.

  “It doesn’t change anything between us,” he hurried to say. “The enforcers haven’t found me yet, and I’m starting to think they never will. It’s been a long time since I felt them—they may have given up looking.”

  Rather than reassuring her, Isaiah saw Ellie blanch.

  “You really believe this, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I knew it would be hard to understand,” Isaiah said, reaching across the table for her hand. To his relief she didn’t pull away.

  By some unspoken signal they didn’t talk about it again for months. They were both busy—Ellie studying for exams and sending out feelers for a job, Isaiah feverishly working on a series of paintings he hoped would help explain who he was—speckled canvases where he tried to capture the sensation of being one with the collective, solid black canvases rimmed in blue to evoke the vastness of the universe. For days on end he stood like someone at attention in front of a painting, his mind whirling through a myriad of possibilities.

  “Where are you?” Ellie asked when he remembered to turn on his phone.

  If he could get the paintings right, he was convinced he could calm Ellie’s fears. Where human words had failed him, visual representations would be more evocative, and in many ways, more accurate.

  “I don’t have time,” he said when Ellie stopped by the studio to take him to dinner. From the corner of his eye he saw her linger for a moment in the doorway, a look of sorrow on her face.

  It couldn’t be helped, of course. Human understanding was limited. He’d make it up to her when he finished.

  With furious strokes, he painted the conflict between conformity to the collective and criminal selfhood, between the gathering of particles and their dispersal. The studio became so crowded that he started putting new paintings in an adjacent room, and when that one was full, he propped his giant canvases in the hallway and hefted brush and palette knife until the janitors threw him out.

  The inpatient psych ward operated on a graduated schedule. Ideally, once patients were over their initial delusions and their medications were stabilized, they met with an individual therapist until they could be trusted to participate in a group setting. From there, most were discharged back to what the nurses called civilian life, as if the patients had been away at war with something other than their personal demons.

  The first time Isaiah was ushered to therapy, he was relieved that the room was empty. He sat unnaturally upright on a sofa next to the window. The office was full of clocks, probably so the therapist could see one no matter where he or she sat. He, Isaiah decided, seeing a man’s overcoat on a hook on the wall. One of the clocks ticked so loudly that Isaiah looked at it reproachfully.

  The therapist was suddenly in the room, a folder in his hand. He crossed to a chair and sat.

  “So, Isaiah,” he said as he opened the folder, “my name is Dr. Manning. How are you feeling today?”

  He looked up then and Isaiah felt a shock of recognition like a jolt. An enforcer! The tingle of charged particles lifted the hair on his arms and the back of his neck. Dr. Manning gave an almost imperceptible nod. So you know me.

  “I thought you’d stopped looking,” Isaiah said. Dr. Manning’s eyes narrowed and he shook his head.

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “To take me back. At first I had to be careful. There were lots of times I could tell an enforcer was close. But I haven’t sensed any of you in a long time. Why now?”

  “What do you mean—take you back? Take you back where?”

  Isaiah felt a surge of impatience and anger. “Please stop pretending,” he said. “No one can hear you. I know why you’re here.”

  Dr. Manning closed his folder. “People have been concerned about you for a long time, Isaiah. A small child who says he is an alien is applauded as creative. Not so at your age. Actual delusional thinking and paranoia are more likely to commence at this stage in a human’s life.”

  It was true. Isaiah had a friend his last year of high school who had been hospitalized after he became convinced that his family wanted to harm him. Even Isaiah’s mother spoke sometimes about her brother’s suicide attempt in his early twenties.

  “Don’t you want to stop this?” the enforcer said, leaning forward in his chair.

  “My family’s going to be upset.”

  “They will be relieved.”

  “They’ll know. This body—it won’t be the same when I leave it. They won’t understand.”

  The enforcer lifted one eyebrow in such an uncanny imitation of a human that Isaiah shivered.

  “Have you been thinking of harming yourself, Isaiah?”

  Isaiah shook his head. “That would only increase my—his—family’s suffering.”

  “You are causing them to suffer now when you talk about being an alien. When you talk about going back to the collective.”

  That, too, was true. An image of Ellie’s face—and his grandmother, and his mother and father—his friends and professors and even the people he knew but didn’t know, like the tattooed barista at the coffee house and the janitor who ran the floor buffer in the art department—whirled up before him, people who would feel his absence when he departed.

  His eyes welled up. The enforcer looked at him oddly.

  “I do miss the collective.” Isaiah sighed. “But I will miss this more.”

  He let Ellie do all the wedding planning. Although she’d snagged a well-paying job at a research firm in California, she was too much of a pragmatist to spend lavishly on a mere ceremony.

  “Besides,” she told her disappointed mother, “it’s hard to predict how much Isaiah will make in a year. We need to save up.”

  “The life of an artist.” Her mother scowled, but Isaiah, a mute witness to the conversation, knew his future mother-in-law was fond of him. She was, in fact, one of his best promoters, badgering her friends to attend his gallery shows.

  Now that he was cured of the delusion that had plagued him since childhood, he felt lighter in his bones, as if he had discarded an immeasurable weight. Certainly his family was happier—particularly Ellie, who encouraged him to check back with his therapist when his artwork turned dark and broody, when he woke from troubled dreams telling her about a different kind of existence, one where he was immortal, a spark of energy in orbit around others like him.

  Standing before a blank canvas, he occasionally h
ad lucid moments where he could see that life—remembering the bargain he’d struck and the trade-off he’d made to live this one, gladly, giving up eternity to remain in this place, this time.

  He could hear, if he listened closely, the echo of the enforcer’s voice, wishing him well, taking his leave, keeping his secret.

  ~FIN~

  Kay McSpadden is the Norman Mailer Prize winning author of Why Women Moan in Bed and has had many short stories published over the years in traditional publications.

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  NO EYE IN EMILY

  A SHORT STORY

  By Patty Jansen

  ABOUT NO EYE IN EMILY

  Two women depend on each other in a deep space mission, sharing nothing except their first name. Emlee discovers quickly that Emily is no ordinary passenger with no ordinary goal.

  NO EYE IN EMILY

  Emlee Grimshaw had barely stepped out of the lift to the main hall of Iovis-X station when she was besieged by a crowd of shouting, pleading people.

  Whoa.

  She had expected the hall to be busy. It always was at the change of shift, when the big mining ships docked and disgorged their crews, and the ships received some speedy maintenance or refuelling and the captains and overseers for the next shift came onto the floor of the hall to select their crews. There would be lines of hopeful workers and the waiting room would be full of tech crew in green station suits. Maintenance crew in orange suits would be running around doing quick patch-up jobs.

  All in a semblance of chaos that was surprisingly organised.

  She had never seen it this busy.

  The familiar lines of workers waited in the usual places—she recognised some of their faces—but there were also a great many people she didn't recognise, who didn't wear station suits or any kind of uniform at all. She'd even say that some of these people looked dirty. And what was it with all the bags?

  Most of these people waited behind roped-off sections in the hall, and the poor station operations workers were having a hard time keeping them there.

  "Get behind the line. Keep the path clear," a woman shouted at a young man who had ducked under the rope.

  He said something to her, and Emlee didn't even know what language he spoke.

  She didn't think the woman understood either, because she kept yelling at him to get behind the line. Her voice faded into the chatter of the crowd as Emlee walked past.

  She now became aware of curious stares. She was dressed in blue—easily recognisable as a pilot. But she didn't think that was why these people were staring at her. They didn't live here. They didn't know anything about asteroid mining and about the pilots who navigated the dangerous asteroid fields and who kept their crew safe.

  They looked tired and disturbed. She even spotted someone handing out food parcels.

  None of them appeared to be wearing construct cohort numbers either. Did that mean that they came from a place where they didn't have to wear those tags? Or were they natural-born people?

  Whoever they were, this noisy crowd in her usual work environment disturbed her. They didn't belong here, they had nothing to do with the operations of the mining station, and they looked like they might cause trouble.

  Emlee was here because her shift was about to start. She flew a vessel called a small operations vehicle. It was an agile, smaller craft dedicated to specialist jobs, usually for purposes of exploration. For this reason, she only needed one or two specialist crew, depending on the job.

  The place to sign up for these jobs was a room on the far side of the hall, underneath the control centre.

  That room at least was blissfully normal. Not quiet by any means, but just normal.

  Various pilots and operations managers perused the available jobs on the ceiling-to-floor screens that listed all the contracts available for tender.

  "What's going on outside?" Emlee asked a fellow pilot who was also checking out the jobs.

  "Out there?" The man glanced over his shoulder to the crowded hall visible through the glass wall. "No idea, but they're getting in the way of my ship. It will take a long time to get the crew on board. I'll be late."

  And being late was not appreciated by the control centre, especially not for behemoth mining ships like he flew.

  "They're from Europa," said another man, walking past while wearing an earpiece and a comm unit strapped to his belt. His name was Piro—cohort Brown735—and he was commonly referred to as Base Control.

  "Hey, Emlee." He smiled.

  "Why did they come here from Europa?" she asked him.

  "There was an uprising and a fight broke out. Some of the habitat control equipment was damaged and there is an atmosphere collapse warning."

  "What do you mean, uprising?"

  "Workers demanded better conditions. They wanted more leave and better accommodation for families."

  "Oh. And that is a reason to destroy the base?"

  "There were also rumours of serious mistreatment of workers the management sees as troublesome. I heard a story about a man being thrown into a water reservoir and being left to swim for hours."

  "That sounds terrible." More than terrible. She shuddered. She hated water.

  "Mind you, I've seen no proof, but a lot of people got angry about poor treatment."

  "All natural-born, I guess?"

  "Of course."

  He gave her a knowing look. Piro was a construct like herself, and constructs didn't even have the right to complain about their rights. Emlee never got any leave—where would she go?—and she slept in a dorm with her cohort sisters. No one had families—cohorts were infertile—and no one complained, mostly because they had nowhere else to go and liked their work. But they were artificially produced humans, not machines. Emlee had felt that restriction on what constructs were allowed to do when she had been rejected from a course at Ganymede University. She wanted to study, and the letter had said, We don't believe it's in the interest of society. What did they mean? We don't believe that constructs should take charge of their own lives?

  "By the way, how about I buy you some dinner?"

  "Oh!" Heat rose to her cheeks. "Me?"

  "Do you see anyone else?"

  "Well, I ... don't know."

  "Tell me when after your shift. Gotta go back to the control room." And then he was gone.

  Emlee clamped her hands around herself. It was not the first time he had asked, and she never knew what to say. She was a techie, not good with words. Not entertaining or funny. She frequently ran out of things to say and she would spoil conversations with opinions about stuff. Like wanting to go to university.

  Too serious her sisters called her.

  To save herself from embarrassment, she had refused all his invitations. She preferred being alone out in space with nothing but a ship and her equipment. Asteroids did not make judgements.

  Emlee selected a job of the type she often did: to find a small icy asteroid and divert it so that a month or two later it could be captured in orbit around Io, where the military bases would break it into pieces and send it down to supply their bases with water.

  Next, she needed a crew, of just one in this case, and she could take that crew from the specialist worker room next door and didn't have to go back into that bear pit that she could still see through the window to the hall.

  She felt sorry for those people. Yes, they did look like they were mostly natural-born, not the usual inhabitants of the station at all. The only natural-born people who lived on Iovis-X were a few in station management. They were high-ranking, beautiful people in clean clothes with hair neatly cut according to strange fashions. They would come to work on the station for short stints of duty away from their opulent homes in Ganymede City or places like that.

  These people were different.

  The construct inhabitants of the station dressed in neat uniforms and did their jobs in timely and orderly
fashion. They were all adults, neither young nor old; they were healthy and neither too thin nor too fat.

  These people were messy: men, women of all sizes and ages.

  Emlee even spotted some of their families, with children. Now that was a rare sight on the station.

  She admitted to being surprised to see that not all natural-born were rich and beautiful people.

  In the skilled workers room where Emlee went next, people waited patiently on rows of seats. Most of these people were tech crew in green station suits, and again many were familiar. Most of them also ignored the chaos in the hall, although one or two would look over their shoulders when a burst of shouting broke out.

  Emlee went to the far wall of the room and perused the variety of talent on offer. She needed someone who had skills with rockets and handling explosives. Also computers. And needed to be able to work independently since she would be flying the craft.

  The list of suggestions was short, and included that horrible Mano Kessler whom she would never work with again, since he had tried to chat her up for the entire duration of a shift, making advances to her, suggesting since there were just the two on the ship, they get their clothes off and get dirty.

  In fact, she had been reluctant to sign on any male crew after that incident. The list included just one female contractor, and a name she had never seen before: Emily Hasegawa.

  Well, wasn't that interesting.

  Hasegawa was a Family last name. As in: a Founding Family from Ganymede or Europa.

  Since when did the lofty Hasegawa family have to work for their pay? They owned the mining companies that owned the station. They were hideously rich and lived in luxurious houses. They held lavish dinner parties while worrying about their nails and about 19th century British literature. They went on leisure trips to Earth, a place that Emlee could only dream about and at times wasn't even sure existed.