Daughter of Time 1: Reader (10 page)

What had it done? What had the monster done? Concern for the voices that cried and anger at the monster overcame my fear. I began to gain speed, to drift toward the other side of the Moon. The lunar surface swept past, and my eyes became focused on the horizon, on the edge where I would see the bright-blue of Earthrise. Soon, any moment now, I would see home and find my way to the cries for help. I could hear them echoing in my mind.

They were calling out my name
.

16

When I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. 
—Anne Frank

When I awoke from the hibernation the transport pod had induced, the first thing to hit me were the smells. Human odors, not alien odors. Odors of human waste and decay, of sickness and death, of filth from a hundred bodies malnourished, unwashed, and weakened with illness and despair. Right after this stomach-churning stink, small robots grabbed us from the pods and herded us through the entry port into a larger chamber. The simultaneous visual assault of what was left of the human beings on this death boat combined with the smell nearly cause me to vomit—an addition to the room that would hardly be noticed. It took a few moments after that initial revulsion for me to finally look into the deep and hollow sockets of the people in the room, and feel the bone-chilling fear of staring death in the face.

They made no sounds. Standing idly or sitting listlessly, voiceless, bent as with great age, these zombies seemed like cattle in pens, dumb eyes staring yet seeing nothing, hair matted, filthy, even falling out. Sores festered on their legs and buttocks, all too visible through the torn and frayed cloth or, in many cases, the lack of any covering at all. These were people who had lost all sense of personal dignity or sense of self. They were emptied of those things that made them once human, or even animal—they were broken and dying.

I had never seen anything like it in my life, even at the worst of the treatments I had received. There were so many of them staring at us. My entire body shuddered. My soul wanted to scream. What could have done this to them? I took the Red Sox cap and placed it over my bulging head, pulling the bill down over my eyes to shield me from these stumbling horrors. It was a pointless attempt to hide from them.

I had no idea where I was now. After I had been sorted at the Sortax home world, and packaged in the pod, I had been made to sleep.
For how long?
It could have been days or years—there was no way for me to tell. Where had they sent me after that? Who had purchased me? Why? There were questions, but in this place, there were no answers to be found.

Like shepherd dogs, the small robots herded us to the far metallic wall. Small depressions in the floor indicated places to stand, and if we didn’t understand, the metallic hounds pushed us around and into place. A loud crash above our heads startled me, and as I glanced upward, a panel slid open to reveal a metal claw with three fingers snaking down toward me. Several people near me screamed, and some tried to run. The robots, merely annoying up to that point, showed that they had a bite along with their bark. They swooped in quickly, zapping anyone out of place with a painful jolt of blue electricity, repeating until we were all back in place. Meanwhile, the claw had descended and clamped around those of us who had not moved, the metal fingers with one hundred joints seemed to morph into a boa constrictor. We were held tightly in its grip.

Once we were all loaded in the claws, they raised us upward into the tube above. Like some part in an assembly line, we were sped along several tubes by the robotic arm, up, sideways, down, and then fitted into place. I was dropped into a hard, wet seat, restraints fixed around my legs and arms, rows of others to my right and left in a similar position. A syringe with a large needle emerged from a small panel to my right, and before I could even react, it had pieced my thigh and injected its contents. To this day, I don’t know what was in it, but I assume it was a combination of antibiotics, vitamins, and steroids—something to keep us alive and healthy as long as possible in the conditions I would soon come to know all too well.

Beneath me, the smell of urine and feces. I noticed that the seat I had been strapped to had a hole in the middle. You can guess what that was for, and what the wetness I felt seeping over my skin where I sat must have been. We worked twelve-hour shifts before the claw brought us back to the holding pens where we tried to sleep; nature would call. We were also fed at our stations. Running the length of our row in front of us was a trough that would periodically fill with a green sludge for our consumption. We had to bend forward and slurp the stuff up with our mouths. At first the rancid smell of it prevented me from eating. But after two days, even that nastiness tasted heavenly to a starving body.

After the needle had withdrawn and several of us had screamed or wept or cried out in other ways, the navigation helmets descended and plugged us into the system. It was like the training sessions, almost the same interface for our minds. At first, we were led through a series of drills, clearly not real, as there was no sensation of travel through hyperspace. The crew was not going to take chances on us guiding them through a star or asteroid field. They had lessons to teach as well, harsh ones. For anyone who did not match the correct trajectories, there was an electric shock, a longer punishment than the robots gave, dispensed from the seat. A few in our group screamed on the first run, the pain so terrible that I saw tears in the eyes of a girl next to me. Mentally, a projection of the correct path was emphasized by the machinery from the helmets, and from that all were supposed to learn. Very soon, all in my group had learned, and the shocks and screams stopped. These lessons never ended. Anyone performing poorly could be shocked at any time. Later on, as our physical and mental state deteriorated in this nightmare, our performance dropped. Some lost all ability, and when shocks did not work, the claw descended and removed the offender. We never saw them again.

After those initial test runs and the harsh punishments, the crew brought us online for the first hyperjump. Again, the beautiful Orb came into view, that increasingly seemed to me like some pure thing in a dirty universe. The indicated paths were shown, and we directed the ship to the set course, and then the tug and inversion feeling of the jump passed through me.

Repeat this endlessly, and you have a good idea of our quality of life.

Our time became a drudging monotony. We never saw any of our destinations. We would guide the jumps, wait in position for docking, hear and feel the loud noises of cargo transfer, and then we were back out and headed to the next jump. This would happen perhaps every hour, giving us ten or twelve jumps per shift. For many it was exhausting concentrating under the pressure of pain to guide the ships correctly. At first for me it was quite simple. As my body began to fall apart over the coming months, it became a challenge even for me to focus on the tasks. By then most of those in the group who had come on board with me had disappeared, having ceased to be able to function adequately. They were quickly replaced.

Much later I would learn from the Xix that this had been a smuggler ship, part of an underground black market of traders that often employed human Readers as disposable slaves. These smugglers ran nearly ceaselessly, maximizing transfers, minimizing downtime, and mercilessly running through humans like some obscene form of organic fuel to drive and guide their ships. It was all illegal but tolerated up to a point by most local authorities. We were considered a low form of life, with poor self-awareness, unable to suffer like the more advanced life-forms. Our exploitation and pain was rationalized away. Laws were often ignored, especially when there was wealth to be had.

I still cannot fully reconcile these two perspectives: one, this galaxy presented academically by the Xix and others, an economic truth of an unfortunate nature; and two, the minute-to-minute torture of the hell I lived through. Those things could not possibly be the same. They were from two different universes. In my current life, I choose not to think of it, because I feel madness lurking in trying to reconcile those incongruent truths. Telling you now is harder than you can imagine. But it must be done. It’s part of the big picture, understanding the truth about reality that you have been made ignorant of until now.

After our long shift, the claw descended and carried us like used baggage to one of several large and crowded rooms. These holding pens consisted of cold, hard walls and floors—no comforts, no divisions for privacy, no separated areas to take care of bodily functions, no space for a human being to have any sense except for a festering claustrophobia. We packed ourselves together, cold, choking on the poorly conditioned air that made our throats and eyes raw, lying in our own excrement, trying to find some short period of sleep before the next shift. During this time we went without food. Anyone acting out was quickly targeted by robots. As you can imagine, there were many who could not adapt. Some turned violent, some became catatonic. Either way both were removed, never to be seen again.

It all sounds so bland as I read what I have written. I don’t have the words to make you smell the stench, feel the oppression of senses, the fear of smothering in others’ awful bodies or of the unclean conditions in which we lay. I know of no way to tell you how this state of existence began to rob me of my sense of self, my ability to think or feel or remember what life on our beautiful planet had ever been like. It was as if all that was real was the horror around me, and anything else was only some faded and remote dream of fresh air, green grass, blue skies, and smiling faces. And hope.

But there was no hope in this place. The dream became ever more remote, seeming a cruel delusion to torment me with beauty and kindness and freedom I could never have. Reality was nightmare, a plane of Hades, and we were the tortured souls never again to know decency.

Every few days the room was flooded with a harsh blast of cold water at high pressure. It left abrasions on our skin, but for a short while it washed the filth out of the way. The water tasted awful and smelled of toxic chemicals, no doubt to further disinfect the room. Our owners used these coarse methods to keep us healthy—sanitizing washes, injections of antibiotics—as long as was possible. But they would not care for us individually, and even these efforts left us, one after the other, depending on our constitution and luck, succumbing to infections we had brought with us from Earth. Our weakened immune systems could not keep up. Skin sores and boils, respiratory diseases, and the ever-present diarrhea brought us down. Some labored on, seeming to have infinite willpower, dragging their skeletal forms forward, coughing blood,
trying
. Others seemed to reach a point at which life seemed not to matter, and they just lay down and refused to do more, and were removed.

“Nights” were the worst part of it, if you can identify a period as day or night in a place with no sun, no changing lights. Like fish in a can, squashed together in filth, hearing the moans of the sick, the weeping of the broken. Their hopelessness was more infectious than anything else. There was no peace, no rest. I almost looked forward to the navigation hours.

And so it went, hour after hour, day after day, for weeks that blurred in my mind until I could no longer keep any kind of count of time. My body began to waste away. I spent several painful sessions with intestinal illnesses that made me wish to die. Soon, I had lost so much weight that my ribs were like an anatomy chart, my pelvic bones jutting sharply from my sides. My clothes were an unwashed, raggedy set of strips that hardly covered anything I normally would have cared to cover. Ricky’s hat was still on my head, but it had been soiled, partly torn, stained beyond ever being clean in this awful place. By this point, I didn’t care. I can only assume my eyes had begun to take on the hollow look of the creatures I had seen when I first entered the spaceship. Creatures for whom death is a mercy to be welcomed.

Through all this time, I had lost the ability, even the desire, to travel into the past and had forgotten anything to do with the future. I was a zombie stumbling forward, knowing only to perform in the seats or face pain, to eat as much of the green sludge as I could before feeling sick, and dreading the feverish nights in the holding pens.

It was at this point that I discovered a thing that would have quickly led to my death, or to the breaking of my spirit before my death.

As I leaned over one navigation session to slurp up the food from the trough, a woman next to me was crying. I would have ignored her. Most of us who had been there more than a few weeks began to withdraw from emotional and social bonds. We became zombies, numb to everything around us except immediate and sharp concerns. The woman was staring at me, crying, then she began yelling. She called me a monster. Finally, I looked over at her. She was a recent addition, acquired at one of the last stops. She was fat, her clothes intact. Her emotional outburst indicated that she would not last long. This place would break her quickly.