“Someone might beat you to it,” I said.
“Just point her out.”
In that moment I thought about the night I had had with the woman who had no name and was for a while part of the dead brothel down on 41st Street. She was only part of it while she was fresh, and then they had to let her go to the sale market for the hunts, and I was lucky to buy her. I almost didn’t win the bid, and I had to keep raising it, and pretty soon I had my bid way up there and it was really far more than I could afford. But I bought her for the hunt. But even then, she was just mine to place in the hunt, not mine or Livia’s to shoot. That was up to circumstance.
It was said many a husband or wife had bought their dead spouses to shoot at because of past grievances, and it even occurred to me Livia might turn the rifle on me. It wasn’t a serious thought, but it passed through my head nonetheless.
I thought about the dead woman now, of how she had been fastened to the bed and her mouth was covered over with a leather strap; how she had writhed beneath me; not because she enjoyed or felt anything, but because she was trying to break loose and she wanted to bite me. I could hear her grunting with savage hunger under the mask, and it was exciting to know what I was doing. I had paid for her with a charge card, and though the card didn’t say brothel on it, Livia was able to figure it all out. It took her awhile, but she got it doped out and then she confronted me, and I didn’t even try to lie. I think on some level I had wanted her to find out, had wanted her to know.
But the young woman beneath me that night at the brothel was still firm and she wasn’t falling apart. She hadn’t been dead long, and what had killed her was heart failure, some inherited condition that took her out young. When she died the dead disease took her over, and her mother sold her to the brothel then; had them come out and capture her and take her there.
A few years back such a thing would have been thought horrible, but now it happened all the time. It was part of the government plan to dehumanize them after they were dead, to make people think of them as nothing more than empty shells that walked and were a threat and were sometimes entertainment. It was an indoctrination that was starting to take hold.
Yet, when I saw the dead out there, wandering over the line, in all manner of conditions, some fresh, some with their skin falling off, some little more than skeletons with just enough viscera and flesh to hold them together, I felt sick. My parents had died but a few years before the flu came that caused so many to become what these poor people were, and I thought if they had lived just another year, they might have been victims, they might be out there. Someone’s parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, you name it, were out there. It was only luck that had caused us and so many others to take flu shots that year, and the flu shots saved us, even though there had never been a flu like this one. Just that simple thing, a flu shot, had saved many from dying and coming back. Those who hadn’t taken the shot, and got the flu, they got worse, died, and came back.
All of this was running through my head, and then I saw the woman. She had on the orange jump suit I had bought for her, and she was staggering toward the meat on the other side of the line.
“There she is,” I said. “The orange jump suit.”
“There are a lot of orange jump suits,” Livia said.
“Not like this one,” I said. “It’s bright orange. She’s off to the side there. She has long black hair. Very long, like yours. Like all the others, her back is to us.”
“I see her,” Livia said.
She lifted her rifle and fired right away. It was a miss. But she fired again and she hit the woman in the back. The shot knocked the woman down. She got up rather quickly, and started walking again, toward the beef.
“I want to see her face,” Livia said.
“That might not happen,” I said.
Livia fired again, hit the woman in the back of the right knee. It was a shot that not only knocked her down, but as she fell, her face turned toward us. It was still a good face, somewhat drawn, but still the face of someone pretty who had once been very pretty in life. And then she caught another shot from Livia’s rifle, this one in the face, just over the upper lip. The woman spun a little, and I think the blow from the heavy load made her neck turn in such a way that it snapped her spine.
When she was on the ground, she began to crawl toward the smell of the meat again. Her head was turned oddly on her neck, and the side of her face dragged the ground as she went.
“I want you to shoot her once,” Livia said. “Then I’ll make the kill. You shoot her in the body.”
Now there were explosions everywhere as the dead targets took hits, and even Livia’s target, the woman I had fucked, was being shot at. Bullets were smashing into the earth all around her and one took off part of her right foot.
“You shoot her,” Livia said. “You shoot her now.”
I fired and missed.
“You better hit her,” Livia said.
I fired again, hit the woman in the body. She kept crawling. Livia just sat there, watching her crawl.
“You want to finish her, better hurry before someone else gets her,” I said.
Livia looked at me. Her eyes were cold. “You better hope no one else does,” she said.
She lifted her rifle and fired. The woman’s head exploded.
After that, we began to fire at will, and I think I blew the heads off four, though someone else’s shot might have taken one of them. I couldn’t be sure. Livia hit at least seven in the head and dropped them. She hit several more in the body, and dropped them. Eventually, someone firing at the same targets got the head.
When it was all done, the guides gathered up the bodies with hooks and carried them to a large and long pile of lumber that had already been laid out and had weathered some. They put the dead on the pile and poured gasoline over all of it and set it on fire.
When the fire was going, the rifles were gathered and stored and we broke for clean up and then dinner, just as the train was starting to move.
Back in our little room we could really smell the gun oil and the stink from the firing. We decided to shower and dress for dinner. There was to be a big formal dinner in the dining car tonight, a celebration of the completion of the hunt. On the way back the train wouldn’t stop, but would run full speed night and day until we arrived back east.
Before I got in the shower, I looked at Livia, and she was obviously different, relieved, as if a poison had been drained from her. I went to the bathroom and undressed. It was tight in there and the shower was close. I turned on the water and began to soap up and shampoo my hair.
I heard the curtain slide back, and there was Livia, naked. She didn’t smile at me. She didn’t say a word. She got in and pulled back the curtain and took hold of me and got me ready and then before I knew it was happening, I was inside of her, pushing her up against the shower wall, going at her for all I was worth.
She was amazing, animal-like even. It was over quickly for both of us. We leaned together, panting. Then Livia was out of the shower, and was gone, and I was left dazed and amazed, satisfied and confused.
When I came out of the bathroom, drying myself with a towel, the lights were on, but Livia had already gone to bed. She was lying in our little bunk beneath the sheets with her back to me, her face turned to the wall. The blanket was folded back to her feet.
I was about to put on my pajamas, when she said without turning toward me, “Don’t bother with your pajamas. Put out the light and come to bed.”
I did. And we did.
It was a great, long night of love, and even as I mounted her, and enjoyed her, and she squirmed beneath me and moaned, I couldn’t help but somehow being reminded of that night with the woman we shot. Like that night, what Livia and I did was not so much making love as it was a pounding of each other’s genitals. It was a savage pelvis fight that left bruises and redness and utter exhaustion.
Later, lying beside Livia, holding her, listening to her breathe, I wondered how long it would be before things went back to the way they used to be. Not just how we could be together without the thing I had done not hanging before us in the air, but the sex, as well; how long before it became mild again, as common as a subway ride, and as boring.
I thought of that and I thought of the strange time I had had with the dead woman in a room on 41st Street, and I told myself that such a thing couldn’t happen again, but I knew too, that while Livia and I had been at it this night, when I closed my eyes, it was not Livia I saw. It was the dead woman I imagined beneath me.
What in hell were the desires of man?
No profound revelation presented itself in answer to my question.
I closed my eyes and thought about many things, but mostly I thought about that dead woman, and how she had been, and how it had been to shoot her today, and how it had made Livia and me fill up with the lava of passion. I tried to think of Livia, and our life, and how much I loved her, but in my mind all I could see was that dead girl being screwed by me or shot by us, and the Fast Train fled eastward.
Charles Stross
Hello? Do you remember me?
If you are reading this text file and you don’t remember me—that’s Lilith Nakamichi-47—then you are suffering from bit rot. If you can see me, try to signal; I’ll give you a brain dump. If I’m not around, chances are I’m out on the hull, scavenging for supplies. Keep scanning, and wait for me to return. I’ve left a stash of feedstock in the storage module under your bunk: to the best of my knowledge it isn’t poisonous, but you should take no chances. If I don’t return within a couple of weeks, you should assume that either I’m suffering from bit rot myself, or I’ve been eaten by another survivor.
Or we’ve been rescued—but that’s hopelessly optimistic.
You’re probably wondering why I’m micro-embossing this file on a hunk of aluminum bulkhead instead of recording it on a soul chip. Unfortunately, spare soul chips are in short supply right now on board the
Lansford Hastings.
Speaking of which: your bunk is in module B-14 on Deck C of Module Brazil. Just inside the shielding around the Number Six fusion reactor, which has never been powered up and is mothballed during interstellar cruise, making it one of the safest places aboard the ship right now. As long as you don’t unbar the door for anyone but me, it should stay that way.
You and I are template-sisters, our root identities copied from our parent. Unfortunately, along with our early memories we inherited a chunk of her wanderlust, which is probably why we are in this fix.
We are not the only survivors, but there’s been a total breakdown of cooperation; many of the others are desperate. In the unlikely event that you hear someone outside the hatch, you must be absolutely certain that it’s me before you open up—and that I’m fully autonomous. I think Jordan’s gang may have an improvised slave controller, or equivalent: it would explain a lot.
Make sure I remember everything
before you let me in. Otherwise you could be welcoming a zombie. Or worse.
It’s nearly four centuries since we signed up for this cruise, but we’ve been running in slowtime for most of it, internal clocks cut back to one percent of realtime. Even so, it’s a long way to Tipperary (or Wolf 1061)—nearly two hundred years to go until we can start the deceleration burn (assuming anyone’s still alive by then). Six subjective years in slowtime aboard a starship, bunking in a stateroom the size of a coffin, all sounds high-pitched, all lights intolerably bright. It’s not a luxurious lifestyle. There are unpleasant side-effects: liquids seem to flow frictionlessly, so you gush super-runny lube from every leaky joint and orifice, and your mechanocytes spawn furiously as they try to keep up with the damage inflicted by cosmic rays. On the other hand, the potential rewards are huge. The long-ago mother of our line discovered this; she signed up to crew a starship, driven to run away from Earth by demons we long since erased from our collective memories. They were desperate for willing emigrants in those days, willing to train up the unskilled, unsure what to expect.
Well, we know
now.
We know what it takes to ride the slow boat down into the hot curved spacetime around a new star, to hunt the most suitable rocks, birth powersats and eat mineshafts and survey and build and occupy the airless spaces where posthumanity has not gone before. When it amused her to spawn us our line matriarch was a wealthy dowager, her salon a bright jewel in the cultural hub of Tau Ceti’s inner belt society, but she didn’t leave us much of her artful decadence. She downloaded her memories into an array of soul chips, artfully flensing them of centuries of jaded habit and timeworn experience, to restore some capacity for novelty in the universe. Then she installed them in new bodies and summoned us to a huge coming-out ball. “Daughters,” she said, sitting distant and amused on a throne of spun carbon-dioxide snow: “I’m
bored.
Being old and rich is hard work. But you don’t have to copy me. Now fuck off and have adventures and don’t forget to write.”
I’d like to be able to say we told her precisely where to put her adventures-by-proxy, but we didn’t; the old bat had cunningly conditioned us to worship her, at least for the first few decades. Which is when you and I, sister of mine, teamed up. Some of our sibs rebelled by putting down roots, becoming accountants, practicing boredom. But we . . . we had the same idea: to do exactly what Freya wanted, except for the sharing bit. Go forth, have adventures, live the wild life, and never write home.
Which is more than somewhat ironic because I’d
love
to send her a soul chipped memoir of our current adventure—so she could scream herself to sleep.
Here are the bare facts:
You, Lamashtu, and I, Lilith, worked our butts off and bought our way into the
Lansford Hastings.
LF
was founded by a co-op, building it slowly in their—our—spare time, in orbit around Haldane B, the largest of the outer belt plutoids around Tau Ceti. We aren’t rich (see-also: bitch-mother referenced above), and we’re big, heavy persons—nearly two meters from toe to top of anthropomorphic head—but we have what it takes: they were happy enough to see two scions of a member of the First Crew, with memories of the early days of colonization and federation. “You’ll be fine,” Jordan reassured us after our final interview—“we need folks with your skills. Can’t get enough of ’em.” He hurkled gummily to himself, signifying amusement. “Don’t you worry about your mass deficit, if it turns out you weigh too much we can always eat your legs.”