Queen, p.5
Queen, page 5
part #1 of Hidden Earth Series
The boat is made of teak wood which, just so you know, does not grow on this planet and is not a reported crop on any colonized world. Also, restarting won’t shut me off. The mella downloaded and removed the personality-free version. I’m the backup.
Ember sat up, far too fast after lying under a hot sun without water. What the mella had or had not done to her suit was irrelevant. This ecosystem simply could not exist on Queen. They could have bioengineered it, maybe, in the habitable zone if New Earth had had resources to spare, which it did not. But here on the sun side, everything was far too hot. Queen orbited in the goldilocks zone of the red sun, but tidal locking meant you were fucked on 90 percent of the planet. None of this was possible.
“Good afternoon. You’re heavier than you look, and my beetle doesn’t appreciate how you smell. We had to rig up a sleigh to bring you in. My friend survived, by the way. If you’d been anyone else, we’d have just killed you.”
Ember recognized the voice of the mella who had both saved her and shot her, though technically, she had shot the woman first. Ember turned, her head complaining the whole way. “Where in hell am I?”
Queen, TOPA provided, its voice reset to factory basic: Midwest US Earth male. Ember hated that voice. It was the only thing she’d ever programmed on her TOPA. She mashed her back right molars together, turning off the suit’s audio.
To turn TOPA off, you must manually override safety protocols, said TOPA, switching itself back on. Either this is your first time using your envirosuit TOPA or the use logs have been wiped for a new user. Would you like a five-minute tutorial?
“The equator,” the mella answered with a half-smile. “Welcome, Dr. Schmitt.”
Ember ignored TOPA. “The what?”
The mella smirked.
Goddamn it, she wasn’t joking. The mella woman loomed over Ember, arms crossed and her cool, khaki-brown skin patchworked with her own shadow. She had black hair, close-cropped with the hint of curls around the lobes of her ears. She’d changed out of the shredded clothes used for protection in the dunes and now wore battered Old Earth biking shorts and a T-shirt that read “The Upper Peninsula. A Special Place.”
“This is not Queen,” Ember asserted. “No way.”
Remote satellite data stored in the envirosuit indicate your current location to be Queen.
“Stop it,” Ember breathed. “Go to sleep.”
TOPA didn’t shut off, but neither did it respond, which was just fine.
The mella crouched and canted her head. She was so close Ember could see the frayed hems of the shorts, the start of a hole on an inner thigh, the torn collar.
“You steal from our recycling pile?” Ember wrinkled her nose and eyed the pit stains. “You know you could just meet the supply ship with the rest of us and requisition clothes, right? You know we would just give you stuff, if you asked. That’s how Queen works.”
“I thought you said this wasn’t Queen?”
Three more women came up next to them. None had suits, and all of them wore the same hodgepodge of Old Earth castoffs. Jean shorts with tattered hems. Moisture-wicking runners’ shirts that had clearly lost their antimicrobial coating. A neon-pink silk skirt with fading gold embroidery at the hem and knees, and that embroidery edged in tiger-lily orange.
The mella formed a loose circle around Ember. Ember kept her butt in the impossible grass. She was going to drown in all this color. Her eyes would explode. It was like having an LED light shined directly in her eyes while she stumbled around a dark bathroom. How in the hell did people live like this? How had she ever lived like this?
Ember mashed her right molars again, and TOPA clicked to attention, cutting off her audio from the external speakers. No need to have mella ears overhearing.
Would you like to take the tutorial now?
“Just give me the readout.” When TOPA didn’t respond immediately, Ember added, “Pretty please, with a cherry mashed into one of your delicate little circuit boards.”
TOPA returned information without inflection, in the blandest monotone Ember had ever heard. No current satellite data are available. Likelihood of being on Queen’s equatorial region is 98 percent. To turn on local satellites and gain access to GPS location, please send an encrypted message to your current administrative head. Please include the reason for being in an equatorial zone and rate your current need of satellite interaction on a scale of one to ten.
“Forget it,” Ember muttered. “How many people are there here, in the wherever we are? Can you at least scan that without a satellite?”
There are one hundred and seven humans and fifty-two quinthropod beetles within a twenty-kilometer radius of your current location. Scans confirm thirty-six dwellings and agriculture of unknown status.
Well, that was all a hard nope, scientifically speaking. Tidally locked planets didn’t work like this, and the mella sure as hell didn’t work like this. Permanent settlements? Purposefully defective satellites? Fucking lakes and boats and topless women in some kind of 1970s Earth pulp fiction paradise? Forget the presidium. If the New Earth Council found out about this, they would be pissed.
A message from Dr. Nadia O’Grady has been received. Heading cannot be read without disabling the adult content filter. Would you like to disable this filter now?
Ember ignored TOPA. “None of us got clearance for easy colonies,” she said, after debating several other questions while the ring of mella stared at her. They were very, very patient, which meant she had to have something they really, really wanted. “We’re on Queen because we’ve got vulvas, degrees, and robust immune systems. These types of ecosystems are supposed to be for people who can’t hack lifelong camping inside a sandbox filled with beetle shit.”
The mella who’d brought her in popped one of the cockiest grins Ember had ever seen and stood back up. “Do you want to debate ecosystems, or do you want the headband?”
Ember assessed the importance of impossible equatorial habitats and trees that thick and tall versus Taraniel’s headband. Not a hard choice.
“Give it back.”
“It’s not yours.”
Ember shot to her feet and promptly fell back onto the sand. Stun guns screwed with equilibrium for days, which, considering she’d only read about them, took her by surprise. “It is mine.”
Another woman stepped up, shorter than Ember’s mella, her light-brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wore sneakers—the kind that weren’t practical even in a gym, jean shorts with little peonies embroidered (and unraveling) on them, and a plain black T-shirt. Her skin was a dark olive, but Ember couldn’t tell if it was from being out in the sun side too long without a suit, or her base tone.
This mella didn’t say anything, but then again, she didn’t have to. Everyone spoke the language of eyes on Queen, a language that said they were all fucked, some more than others, and that as much happiness had to be wrung as possible from the sand and snow or risk becoming a living mummy. Choose one: dehydrated jerky or human popsicle.
Ponytail offered Ember a hand up. She took it and held on even when the mella dug sharp nails into her palm. Ember placed her right foot down too far onto the side and teetered, her equilibrium still whacked.
“How much?” she asked, pointing at the blue blip in the original mella’s pocket.
Ponytail looked at Original, who pulled the strip of leather from a ridiculously shallow pocket common on Old Earth clothes and tossed it at Ember as if it were a half-eaten candy bar she didn’t want to finish. Ember caught it, overextended, and landed hard on her elbow in the grass, the blue clutched in her gloved hand. Her vision blurred for a moment and pain shot in the back of her head as red as the sun, but it didn’t matter because the headband was still so smooth. The leather wasn’t even cracked. It looked more brown than blue, of course, in the red sunlight, but god help her, it still smelled like Taraniel.
“How much?” Ember croaked. “How much for this and the spoon? For information on where you found them?”
Original dropped to her knees and stuck her freckled nose right up against Ember’s face shield. Cracked face shield. Shit. No way to return to the main colony now without a flyer or a body bag.
The mella’s breath bloomed across the glass. “The headband is free. The spoon as well. We just want to talk.” After a moment, she added, “We’d prefer if you didn’t try to fuck us over with the colony. We’d like five days with you.”
Someone behind Ember snickered.
“Grow up, Kate,” Original said.
Days, money, whatever. Ember would give them her breath if they’d tell her where and how they’d got them.
“I agree. I agree to whatever terms you have. You want to break into the colony, you want to shoot the presidium, you want to steal the last shipment of vegetables. Fine. But give me my wife.”
“Can we just kill her?” Ponytail asked. “She isn’t worth it. How many of us has she killed?”
“To date, zero, although we could change that,” Ember spat back at her. “You steal from the colonists. Your people voluntarily left the colony, which is your right, but then you steal from those who choose to stay and contribute. Resources are limited. We kill you. You kill us. It isn’t personal. Don’t make it so.”
“We don’t kill colonists,” Original said, exasperated.
“Awful lot of wanted posters for vegetable stealers,” Ember countered evenly. “Our colonist numbers don’t dwindle on their own.”
Ember glared at Original, back into those damn eyes that looked like they wanted to pity her and then maybe hit her like a punch balloon.
“Tell me about Taraniel.” Ember stood up, shakily, like a sloppy drunk. “Or shoot me. Make a damn choice.”
“A trade on good faith,” Original said. “Information for you removing your helmet. Maybe then we can discuss the note.”
“There’s a note?”
Hadn’t Original said that before? Out on the dune? Maybe?
“Take off your helmet and find out.”
Ember lunged again, stupidly, but before her first foot could hit the ground (and inevitably give out), a cool sheet of plastic pressed into her hand from behind.
Ember didn’t bother to say thank you. She fell to her knees. Her helmet was off a moment later, thrown to the ground with a crack that meant the shield was definitely gone. Her fingers scrabbled over the plastic, so desperate she was to touch Taraniel’s words, to see them without TOPA’s filters.
I love you.
Trust them. Trust me.
The soft skin under her eyes pulsed with the start of tears. Ember didn’t need to be wasting water out here. Taraniel had never been one for long-winded correspondence, and she had to have been exhausted near the end, but still, just this?
“I’m sorry,” Original said, almost as if she meant it. “She left another note for you. Well, a manifest, really, but I don’t have it on me.”
Ember couldn’t process all the information. “How did she die? How long did she live?”
A woman with short black hair and olive skin, and dressed in cloth that might have once been part of a tangerine sari, approached. She offered Ember a plastic cup of water, her eyes defiant. Ember noted an elaborate crosshatching of white scars across the back of the woman’s hand and onto her arm. The marks were short but wide and evenly spaced in rows of three, which was exactly the number of toes Queen’s beetles had.
The random thought wasn’t much use at the moment. As delicious as water sounded, Ember had no free hands as she wasn’t ready yet to let go of the letter or the headband.
“The cancer took her only a few days ago,” Original said.
For the first time in a long time, someone was speaking about Taraniel without sadness or pity, and it helped Ember steady her breathing. Taraniel didn’t need a bunch of desert pirates to be proud of her, but for some asinine reason, Original’s tone decreased Ember’s desire to impale someone with a maple branch. Not a lot, but a little.
“She died in her sleep. She wasn’t in any pain.” Original paused, then added, “She missed you. You were always on her mind.”
“Has she been buried? Burned?”
Original jutted her chin toward the lake. “Submerged. Her request.”
Ember dropped the plastic sheet to the ground but kept staring at the space to the right of Original’s head. If she imagined hard enough, maybe she would see Taraniel’s ghost walk from the water. Right now, all her mind could come up with were visions of her wife’s bloated corpse being consumed, bite by bite, by whatever vertebrate lived in the impossible lake.
Ember should have felt several million things in that moment. But all she could come up with was that Taraniel had died, again, and she was fish food. Ember could have had, what, another few weeks with her if Taraniel hadn’t insisted upon dying alone? Well, alone and also with a bunch of sun-drenched, tired-looking women in wrinkled clothing. The mella had gotten Taraniel’s last moments, and that was bullshit.
“I hate you,” Ember said, both to the mella and to Taraniel’s ghost.
“We know, but it’s done. You can only go forward. Taraniel wanted you to go forward. That’s why we came for you. To honor her.”
“Go fuck yourself in a sand dune.”
The dark, wriggling flame of masochistic hope inside Ember’s chest, which she’d birthed the day Taraniel walked from the settlement, curled in on itself and extinguished.
Trust them. Trust me.
Ember picked up her helmet and pitched it into the lake. She screamed—a sound from low in her throat that ended with her jaw shaking and half-evaporated tears on her cheeks. And then she was on her knees again. Spent. Somehow emptier than before.
“Gloves,” Original said in a voice one would use with an injured puppy. “And then the rest of it. You can’t stay in that suit here. It makes you a target, and you don’t want to use up the oxygen canisters for when you go back.”
Ember nodded dully.
The crowd of women stepped back, and Original came forward. Ember held out her hands and let Original pull her gloves off, pinching the tip of each finger before tugging the white leather. The fresh, temperate air raised the hair on the backs of her hands. Soft, sandless, temperate wind ruffled the strands of hair that blew loose from her ponytail. On Earth, her hair had been cornsilk yellow. Under a red sun, especially in the dunes, it looked like old mud. After four weeks in a helmet, she probably looked as dead as Taraniel. A little less bloated, maybe. Definitely less fish-eaten.
“Dr. Schmitt?”
Ember shoved the headband into the pocket of her suit pants, unzipped, and let the jacket slide off into the sand. The heat of the day didn’t hit her until she had it off—the rabbit leather’s interior insulation protected against cold and hot—and she quickly overheated in the long-sleeved knit top she wore underneath. When Original still looked expectant, she stripped that off, too, leaving only the camisole tank she used in place of a bra. Anatomy was a funny thing, and she’d never had much need of support. She hesitated on the pants.
Original’s eyes moved up and down, assessing Ember, her clothes, and possibly her chest. “Lose the pants too. It’s too hot here for them. We can easily replace the leather. No shortage of Earth rabbits, especially on Queen.”
It occurred to Ember that she’d not seen any rabbits since waking. Interesting, but not super relevant. “Only once you give me something else in their place.”
She shrugged. “As you like. I’m Asher.”
“It’s a man’s name.” Ember stopped short of asking if she wanted different pronouns.
Most everyone used “she” at the colony, regardless, but it’d been different on Earth. It might be different here. They had three thousand colonists in a good year, depending on how often a colony supply ship brought immigrants and restock. But Queen was an all-women planet, by Old Earth definition, where woman meant you had a vulva. The end. Like a turn of the nineteenth-century white feminist utopia book. The rationale was probably bogus at the time, but Ember wasn’t privy to it, and it didn’t really matter anymore. It was done. All of the original seed worlds had funny colonization requirement. Here on Queen, they could combine eggs of course—humans had been doing that on Earth well before the Collapse—but mainly relied on immigration and variation.
So, yes, they were mostly women, and a few men every now and again. It was an anatomical requirement, not a chromosome or gender identity requirement. And there were even fewer like Ember, who lurked in the intersex category that none of the Earth governmental officials had been quite sure what to do with. As long as base, external anatomy matched, you got in. Gender: irrelevant.
