Captive Girl

Captive Girl

By Jennifer Pelland

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Also by Jennifer
Pelland

Copyright © 2006 by Jennifer Pelland
First published at
Helix
Issue 2, 2006

Cover image Copyright ©
Passigatti |
Dreamstime.com
Cover design Copyright © DeAnna Knippling

Published by Apex Publications at
Smashwords

Jennifer Pelland is a short fiction writer
whose work has earned multiple Nebula Award nominations (“Captive
Girl” and “Ghosts of New York”). “Captive Girl” was also
shortlisted for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award. Jennifer lives
outside Boston with an Andy, three cats, an impractical amount of
books, and an ever-growing collection of belly dance gear and radio
theater scripts.
Find out more at:
www.jenniferpelland.com

“Her already-glowing reputation may still be
just a hint of promising light on the horizon of those who like
their fantastic fiction smart, imaginative, and driven by the
mysteries of the human spirit, but each new story as brilliant as
‘Brushstrokes’ and ‘The Last Stand of the Elephant Man’ brings her
inevitable future even closer. Trust me on this: Jennifer Pelland’s
star has only just begun to rise.”
—Adam-Troy Castro, author of
Emissaries From the
Dead

“Jennifer Pelland is addicted to writing
short stories. She’s written an essay about this addiction but you
don’t need to read the essay to know it’s true. Each of the tales
in this collection is a testament to her love of story-telling, and
her imagination. She has a keen sense of irony, and a gift for
juxtaposing images and events in a way which enables her to extract
emotion at crucial moments from her characters and from the
reader.”
—theshortreview.com

“Jennifer Pelland is a very good writer. She
can evoke a setting, an environment, a mood in just a few
sentences. And she does it so intensely that the reader really
feels the fear of touching any potentially diseased subway riders;
feels the thirst of a world without water; feels the aloneness that
comes behind the metal mask.”
—SFScope.com

***

Captive Girl
by Jennifer Pelland

In the choreographed chaos of space, she
searches for patterns that do not fit. She listens to the hiss and
murmur of the interstellar winds; she peers into the visible
spectrum and beyond. Whistling particles stream by, and her mind
sizes them up, then discards them as harmless background radiation.
Just flotsam on the solar winds. Wait, that light— No, it’s just a
weather satellite catching a glint of sun. Too close, anyway. She
does not let anything approach the planet without
scrutiny.

Motion.

She zooms in, listening hard.

“
A-s-t-e-r-o-i-d,” she types out.
“Possible collision course.”

There is a scroll across the very bottom of her
vast vision. “We see it. Calculating now.”

She looks away. The team is on it. This
asteroid could simply be a distraction, and she does not want to be
caught unawares. There will be no repeat of last time. Not on her
watch.

“
It’s a miss,” the scroll says.
“Shift’s over. Come on back.”

And her mind contracts, sinking down, down,
plummeting back to the surface of the planet, past the colony
domes, into the bunkers, deep underground.

Alice gasps through her chest tube as she
crashes back into her body.

Mittened hands grope at the metal mask welded
to her face, and she’s shocked to realize that they’re hers. She
sags forward onto her walker, resting the mask on the padded bar
that rings her. She is too tired to call up any video, any audio,
and surrenders her overextended senses to nothingness. She
struggles to walk forward a few steps, but the seat/body interface
chafes, and she works her mouth in a silent gasp behind the
metal.

Soft hands are on her back, and she
trembles.

With a faint volley of static, her earpieces
switch over to internal audio. “It’s all right. Just relax. You’re
with us again.”

With her tongue controls, she types out,
“Marika.”

And the hands move to the back of her bare
scalp, running along the edges of the mask, along super-sensitized
skin. “I’m here.”

Alice grips the walker tight in her mittened
hands, every part of her body warm and shivery. She clenches around
the seat/body interface and lets a hard breath out through her
chest tube.

She feels a light kiss on her scalp, and Marika
whispers, “They’re watching.”

“
I know,” Alice types back. “I don’t
care.”

Marika pulls off Alice’s mittens, takes her
nailless hands in hers, and says, “My beautiful captive
girl.”

Behind her mask, Alice swoons.

She hears the rude buzz of the intercom, and
over it, Dr. Qureshi says, “That was a good shift,
Alice.”

“
Thank you,” she types.

“
Dr. DeVeaux, I’d like to have a
word with you.”

“
I’m busy with Alice,” Marika
replies, and gently kneads Alice’s shoulders through her thin
cotton gown. Alice’s head swims, and she rocks the mask back and
forth across the bar. Why won’t they just leave the two of them
alone?

“
We need to discuss Selene’s
readings,” Dr. Qureshi says.

“
I want Marika to stay.”

“
I really do need her
help.”

Marika leans in and whispers, “I’ll be back as
soon as I can.” She gives Alice’s shoulders a squeeze, and when she
lets them go, the shock of absence makes Alice draw in a pained
gasp through her chest tube.

And then she is alone, a woman behind a solid
metal mask, with ears calibrated for the solar winds, and eyes that
can only see the stars.

*

Marika is kept away all night. Alice has to
amuse herself by watching feeds and vids, because her only other
options are music, which is too passive to keep her input-starved
brain occupied for long, and conversation, which is currently
impossible. Jayna is on shift right now, Selene is sleeping, and
the caretakers are all busy discussing how to keep her from going
even more insane.

They are a shift of three. There can be no
replacements.

Alice briefly scans the news feeds, hoping for
distraction, and finds that as usual, nothing has changed. The
relief convoy from Earth is still on hold, the rebuilding continues
to go slowly, and there is still no real information on the
mysterious black ships that nearly destroyed their colony ten years
ago. The talking heads just keep rehashing all their old theories —
that it was aliens trying to drive humans from their first and only
extra-solar colony, that United Earth sent the ships to punish the
colonists for forming an independent government, that it was the
wrath of some angry god, that it was a natural phenomenon that only
looked like spaceships, that the colony government bombed its own
domes to cover up some unspeakable crime. She’s heard it all
before. None of it makes any difference to her. None of it changes
her job.

No, the news is no real distraction. Alice
pulls up some chamber music and a slideshow of images of happy
families that she has made over the years, culling pictures from
news stories, from magazines, from movies. Some are real families,
some fictional, but she cherishes each and every image just the
same — the pigtailed blonde laughing on her father’s shoulder, the
teenagers tossing a ball back and forth under the lights of the
main colony dome, the little baby curled up in its mother’s
arms.

She touches the mask. It’s worth it. For
them.

And then she sneaks a peek at the tiny,
pixelated picture that Marika doesn’t know she has. It’s the only
image she’s been able to find of her. She’s young in the picture,
in high school, posing with the rest of the track team under an
undomed sky that can only be on Earth. Marika is in the back row,
so all Alice can make out are broad, tanned shoulders, a mane of
dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a brilliant smile. But
it’s enough. It’s something.

She can never tell Marika that she has this.
They’re supposed to be faceless for each other. Marika insists on
it.

Marika.

She shudders.

No, this isn’t helping either. A movie will
distract her until Marika returns.

Alice searches the mainframe for a film she
hasn’t seen. So few get made anymore. The economy can barely
support the basic needs of its citizens, and entertainment is a
luxury that is rarely indulged. But all she can find is something
called
Love in a Time of Bombardment
.

No. She will not relive the attack. The attack
is not entertainment. It can never be entertainment.

She tugs at her feeding tube to try to get it
into a more comfortable position, and feels the thick, thumbless
mittens being pulled back over her hands. “no no no no no no no,”
she types, but her unspoken assailant ignores her and ties the
mittens to the walker’s rail.

They’re so afraid she’ll become another Selene.
This is exactly the wrong way to go about keeping her
sane.

She bangs her mask hard against the walker’s
padded rail in protest, then thrashes her head from side to side
when her assailant tries to stop her. It’s no use. She is pushed
back against the padded chair of her walker and strapped down. The
seat/body interface tugs uncomfortably between her legs, and she
opens her mouth as far as it will go behind the mask to scream out
her silent fury.

Over the earpieces, she hears Dr. Qureshi say,
“Alice, you need to keep calm.”

She struggles to type, struggles to get her
tongue to work properly. “im jst uncomfrtblee.”

“
Alice, you’re not making any
sense.”

How can she make sense when she is blind and
deaf and lashed to a walker against her will? How can they possibly
expect her to…

It doesn’t matter what they expect. All that
matters are her actions. She takes in several deep gulps of air
through her chest tube, trying to calm her trembling muscles, then
types, “My feeding tube was uncomfortable. I was just adjusting it.
You didn’t need to tie me down.”

“
We need to be safe, Alice. You know
that.”

“
I’m fine.”

“
And we need to keep you that
way.”

“
I want to talk to
Marika.”

“
Dr. DeVeaux is busy.”

“
I have a right to be with
her.”

“
Alice, we’ve been over this. You’re
in no position to—”

“
I’m nineteen years old. I have
every right to decide who I want to be with.”

“
You only think you love her. She’s
been your caretaker for the entire length of the program. Of course
you’re attached to her.”

Marika’s touch was the first one she’d felt
after waking up in the mask and the chair. She’d held Alice while
she screamed voicelessly, sobbed tearlessly, panicking behind the
metal. She was the one who sat patiently with Alice until the
awkward tongue controls became second nature, and she was finally
able to communicate with the world on the other side of the mask.
Her hands were the only ones to soothe away the nightmares, to
knead her ever more atrophied muscles, to massage ointment into the
scar tissue around her implants and mask. They were there when
Alice’s body first started developing curves, when she started
craving a different kind of touch. Marika is the only one that can
make her feel like a woman instead of simply a captive mind
dragging a useless bag of bones behind it.

Yes, of course she is attached to
her.

“
Dr. Quershi, this is none of your
business. I’m an adult now, and I choose to be with
her.”

“
And I’m trying to tell you that
it’s grossly inappropriate for her to exploit your feelings
by—”

Alice pulls up a loud music file to drown out
the rest of the lecture. Marika will come back. She always does.
And Alice will wait for her, lashed to her chair by her chest and
wrists, as long as it takes.