Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (4 page)

Margo had fully intended to keep to her closet-room as much as possible until they’d come to a UN Sky station. But whenever she asked Diallo, the grinning pilot, how close he thought the nearest one was, he would call her a little dictator and offer her some of his reconstituted soup (the sort of lumped up stuff that poor people ate before there were food labs). Also, Pilgrim Pilgrim and his one-eyed first mate seemed to be much more comfortable when she stayed put, and Margo didn’t see any reason to make them comfortable.

So, she dragged herself all around that filthy, rusted-out ramjet, seeing what she could see.

They were hiding something. Margo had figured out that much. They were carrying something—in the cargo bay, maybe elsewhere too—that they didn’t want found. There were a few too many halted conversations to ignore. A few too many badly suppressed glances in her direction.

Not that they were afraid of
her
finding it, necessarily. Even if they’d known who she was, she doubted it would mean anything to most of them. Most stepped right around her and carried on with their work when she crawled by, looking down to grin at her only when she called out cheerfully to keep from being stepped on.

But Kell and Captain Pilgrim had guessed something about her. The captain would straighten when he saw her, and ask her if there were any particular reason she needed to be there, wherever there happened to be. And Kell, whenever he came on her by accident, usually turned directly around and walked in the opposite direction.

“You don’t let it bother you,” Diallo had tried to tell her. “You must excuse a degenerate like Kell. Raised on a prison colony, the American kind. No hope of learning good manners, no experience with women. His mother was not a very successful prostitute.”

Margo smirked. “How can you be raised in a prison colony?”

Diallo shrugged. “Perhaps his mother was also a less than successful terrorist. I can’t claim to know.”

Margo studied his smile a moment. “But there are
no prison colonies anymore.”

“No?”

“Not in UN space,” she said, sounding like a teacher even to herself. “The Security Council ruled a long time ago that abandoning prisoners on far-world correctional colonies constitutes inhumane punishment. The ruling was just upheld again the year I was born. It’s illegal.”

Diallo smiled, or at least showed his teeth. “That is comforting to know. Thank you.”

“It’s true.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“That’s the whole point of UN Sky. To make sure stuff like that doesn’t happen.”

Diallo was silent for a moment, and then said, with irritating slowness, “As you say. It does seem to me that people will always discover a place to put away the things they do not want, so that they don’t come back again. But I’ve never been very clever with names.”

Later, while she lay in her bunk trying to think of all the things criminals would not want UN Peacekeepers to find in their cargo bay (nukes, sonics, VX gas, high-power low-precision lasers?), Margo could not help thinking about Kell’s glass eye.

People without eye donors had biomechanical eyes. They had microchipped acrylic ones. At the very least, Margo had always thought, they had those plastic boxy pieces that you had to keep a cap on at night to block out images while you slept.

When you were Kell, on a faraway colony, and you knocked your eye out, what had to go wrong, what had to break down, before you fashioned your own out of whatever you could find, and carried on?

“Someone’s taken an interest in us,” was the first thing Diallo said when Rumer came on to the bridge.

“Peacekeepers, or the Kang family fun squad? Or both?”

“It’s difficult to say. She’s not marked. And she is keeping her distance.”

“Blueberries,” said Kell. “Gotta be. You’ve heard that bitch talk. She knows somebody.”

Rumer ignored him. “Can you signal-cloak us?”

“I have done, of course,” said Diallo. “But I cannot do it long, and eventually she finds us. Very quietly persistent.”

“Keep on it ’til you shake her. She don’t want us that bad, or she’d be on us already. We make our drop, even if we gotta pour it down there like manna.”

Diallo nodded, and bent over his joysticks.

“About that,” said Kell, rubbing his eye.

“About that,” said Rumer.

“What’re you thinking you’re gonna do with her? Our hitchhiker, I mean?”

Rumer shrugged. “I don’t know as I have a whole lot of options. We take her with us far as we can, drop her at the first opportunity, and hope she has the good sense not to talk to anybody.”

“You don’t mean you’re still gonna take her on the drop?” Kell looked entertainingly uncomfortable. “Jesus, Rumer, she’s not… she can’t even… plus, you heard her, she’s dyin’ to talk to the police. She thinks police are like… service dogs, or somethin’.”

“Don’t shit yourself, soldier. We drop her at Black Oven before anything else happens. It’s backworld enough no one’s going to care why we’re there, and she can go about her business, and we about ours.”

“Pretty outta our way, isn’t it, Black Oven?”

“Everything’s out of our way. What do you suggest?”

Kell shifted a little. “Hey, I’d just like to remind you, but we got about two tons a’ very perishable cargo down there, and there’s some very angry Koreans want it back. This was your idea, this thing. I wanted to do something small, something normal that’d make us a little fuckin’ money. You’re the one who wanted to go all Wyatt Earp Robin Hood…”

“What do you suggest, Kell?”

“Well,” Kell hesitated. “Well, have you thought maybe we just… maybe we just get rid a’ her?”

“How the hell you want to do that?”

“I don’t know, man…”

“Yeah, you do, asshole.”

“Look, she woulda’ been dead anyway if we hadn’t picked her up, that’s all I’m tryin’ to say. Just, in the interest of the cargo. I’m not saying exactly we should, you know…”

“What are you saying, exactly, you fuckin’ moron?”

“I’m saying, you know, maybe, we put her in one of the shuttles, with some food, if you want, and we just…” Kell mimed the dustpan’s tiny shuttle drifting harmlessly away into space.

Rumer smirked, despite himself. “I thought you wanted to fuck her.”

Kell recoiled like he was standing too close to a serial kiddie-diddler. “She’s in a
chair,
man, don’t even joke. That’s some sick shit.”

Rumer rolled his eyes. “Turn the temp down in cargo and head for Black Oven,” he said to Diallo. “She’s clever enough to catch her own ride from there, I expect.”

Margo wasn’t going to let them continue to have their muttering, panicked, poorly-buried talks around her as though she didn’t understand what they meant. From now on, she would be where they were. If they wanted to continue having conversations about their secret black hole machine, or whatever, they’d have to do it while she was in the room.

That was Margo’s reasoning for finally joining them at dinner.

They had boiled the turtles, neatly diced, in four tins of reconstituted cream of tomato soup. Chin-Hae, the ship’s cook, who was alternately sipping beer out of his prosthetic leg and adding it to the pot, looked up grinning when she appeared. Margo hadn’t known that anyone still ate turtles. But then, until this voyage, she hadn’t known there were spaceships that couldn’t leave immediate space, or people who replaced their vital members with removable plastic and bottle-glass.

The mess turned out to be two long metal tables bolted to the floor. The men crowded around them on one-footed metal benches and passed stories and sloshing carafes of beer. Every one of them had scars they bragged about, and for the first time, Margo wondered whether this was because they really took any pride in them, or because they lacked the technology to remove and forget them.

Pilgrim Pilgrim looked up at her. “Come to eat, or just watch?” he asked.

“Eat.”

“Waitin’ on the servitors?”

“No.” Though Margo realized as she said it, that she had been.

The captain tossed her down a thick wooden bowl. “Queue up and get yourself some turtle surprise, before this mess of rapists and degenerates eats it all.”

Margo paused, then dragged herself to the back of the line forming in front of Chin-Hae’s pot. When it was her turn, Chin-Hae winked at her, a little drunkenly, and filled her bowl to the brim, tilting in a little extra beer from the bottom of his leg.

He intended this as a kindness, she was sure, but it meant that she had to make her way to the tables pushing along a wildly sloshing bowl of oily turtle meat. The whole crew watched, apparently entertained, while she left a splash trail. Margo stopped at the benches. “You’re gonna want to help me up,” she said.

“Sure a’ that, are you?” said Kell.

“Pretty sure,” she said, evenly.

No one moved, so Margo proceeded to get up onto the bench herself. She couldn’t put weight onto her legs, but if she lunged forward violently enough, the one-footed bench rocked, no matter who was sitting on it. If she did that enough times, eventually the drunkest lost his balance; the man who’d sewed his own arm back on fell straight backwards, which made everyone laugh too hard. “All right, all right…” He picked her up under the armpits and stuck her in his own seat. “Christ, you’re a shit.”

Diallo cut Margo a thick slice of very brown bread for her soup. Rumer Pilgrim poured her a cup from the carafe, and raised his own, almost imperceptibly. Margo flattened the smile on her lips.

Before long, Chin-Hae brought out a very motor-oil looking whiskey, and some apples and pears in tin cups, roasted without cinnamon or sugar. “Enjoy these, gentlemen,” said Pilgrim, frowning at the fruit, and Chin-Hae. “They’re the only ones you’re like to get out of the bunch.”

“We’re damn well going to have some,” said Kell. “They cost us enough.”

“Why?” asked Margo.

“’Scuse me?”

“Why would you pay for apples? What kind are they?”

No one answered her. “Are they rare, or something? They look like lab apples.” The fruit was just exactly like the smallish, slightly underripe specimens that came out of every food lab in every corner of every galaxy in UN space.

The captain paused, then said, eyes on Kell, “That could be considered rare enough for some folks.”

Margo knew a little history. “Sure, but… not anymore, though. People don’t pay for stuff like that anymore.”

“Stuff like what, do you suppose?”

“Like, fruit, or grains, or simple proteins. That’s the whole point of food labs. You’re always replicating, so there’s no food shortages, and nobody has to pay.”

Pilgrim nodded. “Well, that’s a cracker-jack idea if I ever heard one.”

“It’s part of the rules of compliance for a colony’s admission to the UN.” That terrible, smug, teachery voice, again. Margo couldn’t seem to help herself.

The captain took a swig of his whiskey. “But it only works long as everybody plays by the rules, long as nobody takes more’n they need.”

Margo nodded, conceding.

“So, to your knowledge, who runs these food labs? Who maintains them? Who stops people takin’ more than they need?”

“There’s… private companies,” said Margo. “They’re vetted by the UN.”

“Family companies?”

“Sometimes.”

“And so what stops a real powerful company, a real powerful
family
from… gettin’ creative? Say they start to decide for themselves who needs what. Say they start thinking they’d like to bring a little money back into it, or they’d like to put a limit on, I don’t know, milk, for certain families with too many kids? You could keep a whole solar-system full of folks currying your sweet favor, if you went about it the right way.”

“That would never be allowed to happen,” said Margo.

“Why not?”

“Because it wouldn’t! Because there’s audits of compliance. There’s officers who come and make sure you’re following all the rules.”

“And how well do those work out here, do you think?”

“How well do they
work
?”

“You think they work well here in our dark neck of the woods? I’m just asking.”

“I don’t know.” Margo’s voice was way too tight in her throat. “I don’t know where we are.”

Rumer Pilgrim nodded. “Alright. Do you think every man always does exactly the job he’s supposed to, even when there’s no one to watch him do it, even when he’s far from home, in a place he can’t stand?”

“Are you talking about Peacekeeping Officers?”

“I’m just talking about men. There’s a lot of men sent to do their jobs in the very deep dark of space where nothing thrives and no sound travels. How easy you think it would be for our family—this very powerful hypothetical family we’re talking of—to have a few such men in their pocket?”

“Somebody would say something,” asserted Margo, more loudly than she meant to. “Somebody would alert Sky headquarters.”

“They might,” said the captain levelly. “If they had any idea how to go about it. And if they didn’t mind a slow kind a’ death. Starving’s slower than just about anything, you know. Your body holds on like a muther, eating away at all your fat, and then all your muscle…”

Margo stared at him, her stomach pitching with understanding she didn’t want. “What are you hiding in the cargo bay?” she blurted. “Who’s looking for it?”

Pilgrim paused, opened his mouth. Margo didn’t want to give him the chance to lie. “My name is Margo Glass. I’m Helena Glass’s daughter.
I’m the daughter of a UN Security Council member, you stupid motherfuckers!
If somebody’s breaking the law, if they’re starving people,
you have to tell me. Understand?
You have to tell me!”

“Young lady,” said the captain, but didn’t say anything more.

“
Say it!” Margo was suddenly snarling. “Say what you’ve got in the cargo bay!”

But of course, Margo could never really cow anyone, no matter how loud she shouted. It was easy, infuriatingly easy, for Pilgrim to pick her up, throw her into her cupboard, shut the door, and walk away.

Rumer let the air out of his chest, and felt himself sag. Kell looked at his captain with a cloud in his glass eye. “You still think we can carry this girl all the way to Black Oven? Look, I can’t speak for you, but I’m not prepared to die spoon-feeding a bunch of sad, sorry motherfuckers we’ve never even met, and I’m certainly not prepared to go to some new kind a’ interstellar prison because some UN Security cunt decides we kidnapped her whelp.”