Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (29 page)

They recruited Renee because she is the best. They recruited Renee because she was the top of her class, a decorated hero. They recruited Renee because she has no children to complicate matters, only Ismael. They recruited Renee because the moment the mission was announced, even before she spoke with Ismael, she drove to Central Command, flooring the gas the whole way, and volunteered.

An unspoken truth: Ismael has come with his wife in order to say goodbye.

Ismael and Renee have marked the passage of the years with notches on the world’s bedposts. They like fucking in the strangest places they can manage. It has become their tradition.

On their third date they made love in the space flight training simulator after Renee gave Ismael a behind-the-scenes tour of the training facility: Ismael in the pilot’s seat and Renee straddling him, her head bumping up against the controls in the ceiling, gray-socked feet ramming the thrusters. The simulated spacecraft wrecked from orbit, and they scored a 36%, high marks in speed but low in accuracy.

Marry me,
Ismael signed twenty seconds after climax, still gasping for breath, but her eyes were rolled upwards, fixed and concentrating hard on the ceiling, so he wasn’t sure if her answering
yes
against his back was a response to her question, or something else.

After that, they entered into a tacit game of one-upmanship. There have been Mile-High Clubs and Seventy-Mile High Clubs. There have been close calls at their parents’ houses, and at the grocery store. Once they did each other in the closet of an elementary school where Renee had been invited to speak for Career Day. They apologized profusely when the school nurse walked in on them. After her speech, they went back and fucked each other again, taking care to lock the door.

It took all of this before Renee finally convinced Ismael to take off the dragonfly for the first time. It scared him. It still scares him. But with her there to anchor him, it was okay.

Public Law 170-112—alternately called the
Universal Newborn Implant Act
, or the
Deaf Genocide
, depending on your political affiliation—establishes the right of all newborns to receive a neural implant shortly after birth. If it can access the cranial nerves early on, neuroplasticity will ensure a lifetime of easy access to the brain, should any sort of ailment require it. Paired with the right accessories, it can correct visual problems, take over functions lost in a stroke, or bypass the cochlea to stimulate the auditory nerve directly, should a child be born deaf.

It is this last thing that shattered the Deaf community in two: those who saw wisdom in the law, and those who saw a future without name-signs and visual storytellers. At Gallaudet University, at Deaf Mecca, they argued, and as dragonflies alit behind thousands of tiny ears, some took to the sea rather than allow it to happen to their children.

No one even tried to defend us,
Renee once said on the subject, hands trembling in anger.
The hearing-people don’t believe there was anything wrong with what they did.
She signed
hearing-people
the derogatory way, high up on the forehead, face mocking.
They could have left us alone.

Clashes like these are the faults that form mountain ranges. Revolutions arise from smaller disagreements than this.

Ismael has nightmares where his dragonfly falls from his head, its little legs crooked around its body, its lights snuffed out. With it goes his voice. There is no sound in a vacuum.

An unspoken truth: Ismael is terrified of the void.

Ever since Renee volunteered for the mission, though, his nightmares have changed. There is a mountain range, and from one side, the dragonflies rise in the night like embers in the wind, cross the ridge, and fall like bullets upon the Deaf children below.

In these dreams he catches one in his fingers and tosses it in the air again. It circles, rises, and returns over the ridge.

You’ve been pranking the neighbors, I see.
Renee giggles and turns the door latch hard behind her so the seal catches.

She deserved it. You’ll like her
. Ismael is already zipped into the double sleeping bag hooked to the wall so he won’t careen into the ceiling during the night. It’s supposed to be two one-person sleeping bags, but when the gravity got too low for blankets and sheets, they opened them flat, placed the nylon faces together, and zipped them into one.

Ismael stows his book into the wall locker and kisses her lightly, chastely. Renee is already peeling off her flight suit and working the zipper down the sleeping bag.

Nice to see you,
he says.

Nice to fuck you,
she answers, rolling her eyes, lolling her tongue.

Ismael cuts his eyes toward the shared wall.
They said we’re being too loud
.

Renee’s grin is wicked, feline as she shimmies his shirt off and lets it float free into the cabin.
Let’s show them how much louder we can be.
She swats off the dragonfly, and it takes flight.

Ismael’s game is code-matching dialects. He loves the unenforced boundaries of languages, the shifting vowels and consonants creeping from palate to teeth to lips, how there comes a point of demarcation where meaning shifts.

It reminds him of genetic drift. A bear and its mate cross a mountain ridge. Many generations later, two distant relations meet. If they are still one species, they can mate. If they have changed, if they are lost in translation, they will clash as strangers.

Why not give the hearing people the benefit of a doubt, Renee?
he says after one of her angry monologues. It is day seventeen since launch, and they are drinking coffee in the mess hall.

The time for conversation is over. They lost their chance to call us their own when they tried to exterminate us
. Her heat is palpable; even the hearing people have stopped pretending not to stare.
There can be no conversation between two people when one doesn’t think the other is human. But maybe they’re right. Maybe we have moved beyond humanity. Maybe it’s time we just… left.

This argument has come around and around since they first met.

They have the implant too,
Ismael points out.
It’s not a concession, Renee. It’s… a bridge.

Well, it only goes one way, then. I’ve never once seen them make the effort to speak to me in my own language.

Oh, that’s not true. Plenty of hearing people try to learn sign.
Ismael feels a pang of guilt for the bad-faith lesson to the neighbor woman.

But they don’t sign well. Just as a hobby. A condescension.

You’re being a little unfair. They’re trying. It’s hard to learn to sign when you’ve only ever spoken,
Ismael points out.
Just like it’s hard to lipread.

Stop defending them.

You never used your implant, You don’t know what it’s like. It’s useful.

Renee’s fingers brush the scar behind her ear, a numb white line in the crease, practically invisible.
No one had the right to modify our bodies without our say-so.

It only works if you get it young. They wanted us to have the most options.

They could have given you signing. Your signing is sloppy now.

Sorry.
But he grins, because he knows she finds the sloppiness charming.

Renee rises, draws him to his feet, folds him into her arms, inhales the sweaty musk of his skin. Then she holds him at arm’s length.
Ismael. Listen. What kind of marriage would ours be, if we were not free to leave? It makes the staying matter. That’s what the hearing people don’t understand.
Her keen pilot’s eye glances upon the bright star of Vega out the panoramic viewing port.
At least, not the ones on this ship.

On the eighteenth day of the voyage, their ship has reached hailing distance of Vega, and Ismael works in shifts with the other diplomats, trying to make contact. In a closet-sized room off the bridge, he sets his dragonfly to communicate with the broadcaster and calls out into the void for someone to answer him.

No one has heard from the Vegans since they sent back the diplomat’s tongue with the declaration ceding their humanity. No one knows what to make of the declaration. It may or may not be true. They closed their ports to trade, cut off all communication. Satellites showed earthen mounds raised over the cities, the residents gone below. Then the satellite feeds went dark, too.

There is a script the diplomats all agreed upon. It drones on repeat, identifying the ship, demanding the Vegans respond to their motherworld, that they end their rebellion and enter negotiations. But when Ismael is on duty, he takes the program offline and speaks for himself. Mainly he tells stories, bright exciting tales sketched in the air, moving through time and space. There once was a sailor on a long voyage. There once was a woman who flew to the Moon. There once were two bears who crossed a mountain range, and when their descendants returned, it was a homecoming. Family long lost, but never forgotten.

If they would only answer, Ismael thinks he could change Renee’s mind. But nobody answers.

Tell me,
he begs while making love.
Tell me why you volunteered.

Renee smiles, slit-eyed, and slides down his chest to nuzzle his belly.
I am a wicked woman. I am going to do something very wicked.
Her head slides lower.

The dragonfly alights on his ear and crawls down the rounded pinna to its customary spot in the crease. At once the soundscape bathes his brain: Renee’s ragged gasps, and his answering moans, the distant, droning hum of the engines, voices murmuring through the thin metal panels, and the neighbors pounding on the wall.
Keep it down, would you,
says the woman next door. Ismael flinches, loses concentration, reaches to pull Renee close to his chest.

When she raises her head, her eye flick straight to the dragonfly. She angles him off with an elbow.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. You never listen when you wear that thing.

I do too,
he tries to say, but Renee has already cut him off, rolled away, closed her eyes, gone where his hands can’t reach her.

Tell me why you volunteered
, he signs again to himself, in the dark. Then, clearing his throat: “Tell me.”

He knows. He knows he is going to lose her when they get to Vega. It hits him while the pre-recorded message drones in the little room: he will have to be the bridge. If he can make her love them, this long descent into the void will stop, maybe even reverse.

He waits until they are in the middle of it together, sweat sticking skin to skin. He draws her into a long kiss and holds her there. It isn’t hard to find the dragonfly, peel it from behind his ear. He caresses Renee’s pinna, feels the little button-sized bump of her implant, and presses the dragonfly there firmly, holding it in place so it won’t zip back to its proper spot.

Renee’s eyes snap open, wide and terrified. Her lips pull back against the kiss. Her teeth snap shut like a falling gate. She tries to claw at her head, but Ismael pins her arms down. Silenced, she struggles more, now kicking and biting at him, jabbing at all his soft, naked places.

“It’s okay,” he tries, but she plants a foot in his stomach and forces him away. The dragonfly takes off, circles, and lands behind his ear, and when it does, he realizes she’s sobbing.

What the hell was that, Ismael?
She signs compact and small, near the center of her body. Her arms and knees curl tight to her middle as she floats away from him.

Oh, it was nothing to be scared of, Love. It was just the dragonfly
. He reaches for her, but she shudders away from him.

You knew. You knew I didn’t want that.

I just wanted you to understand.

Understand what?

It’s not so bad. They’re not so bad. I don’t want you to do… what you’re planning.

Renee rubs tears and sweat from her face, and draws a blanket around her.
And just what am I planning, Ismael?

Maybe he got it wrong. Maybe he has been wrong this whole time.
I don’t know. I think… I just don’t want to lose you.

Renee grabs a free-floating strap on the sleeping bag and tugs her way closer, and he thinks she has forgiven him until she starts working the double-zipped sleeping bag apart.
Well, you’re doing a lousy job of that.

Day twenty: one quarter gravity. Renee is asleep by the time he gets back from the broadcast station. At least, she pretends to be. In the night, confused by gravity’s return, he rolls off the bed and hits the floor in slow motion.

Day twenty five: three quarters gravity. The weight feels like wearing too many clothes. Stuffy. Uncomfortable. Renee waves him off when he reaches for her.
We should rest for the arrival.
The truth is, neither sleeps much.

Day thirty: full gravity. Feeling time slipping away from him, Ismael tries to draw her close when she comes to bed that night.

You’re crushing me,
Renee says, and shoves him off.

Are we okay?

Of course,
she answers, but she turns her back on him and goes to sleep on their last night together.

The morning before the mission, Vega looms outside their porthole window, green and white against the black of space. Renee rises very early and dresses in her dark green flight suit before the breakfast call. Stirred by her absence, Ismael snaps awake just in time to see the door swinging shut behind her.

She never told him she had to report for duty today. They were supposed to spend it together, alone, in case it was their last.

Quickly Ismael pulls on dirty sweats and steals after her down the back corridors of the ship, passing only a few tired-eyed lookouts on their way to their bunks, before arriving in the darkened hangar where all the gleaming jets stand ready for tomorrow’s fall into the void. Renee is struggling to load a missile into her jet’s cargo hold when his reflection shimmers on the painted metal.