Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 Read online

  Dot had feathers all over ber slender body. There are no birds in the City, of course, and I've never even seen a bird. But I've cleaned up feathers and had a chance to examine them. They're synthetic, but intricate, with little strands that catch the light.

  I hadn't seen Dot up close since our first meeting. I'd forgotten quite how delicate and lovely be was, how elegant those little bones. I wasn't prepared for the sudden awakening of my harnt and the tightness inside my stomach.

  "Oh Mab! Oh my Mabirelle! You do so much kindness to my poor faltering heart!” Dot had obviously memorized tons of this crap.

  "Shut up and listen,” I said. “I've figured out why you're doing this."

  "There is no reason, other than your beauty, which so dazzles my eyes that all other sights are cataracted to me."

  "I said shut up. And sit down, you're making me nervous.” I gestured at the greasy cushion next to me. “So here's what I think: you're doing this for attention. You were losing status, or playing some pilot game that the rest of us don't even grasp, and you decided to make yourself the hero in some epic love story. The pilot who fell in love with a daily against all odds. They'll sing about you forever, if you don't get thrown out of the upper rings for sullying your honor. It's a gamble, but you're a shrewd one. Am I right?"

  "Oh, my Mabirelle. Your wisdom is second only to your beauty, which far surpasses the brightest jewels. But no, you're wrong. There's no purpose to my love other than love itself. And no cure for my love other than your love returned to me."

  "I was afraid you'd say that. Okay, let's go. I'll do you right here."

  "But I—That's not what I—"

  "If it'll end this. Come on, get all those feathers off you. I've never seen a pilot naked. I'm curious."

  And I was curious. It's weird that pilots are the opposite of dailys, but most of us never get to see what they look like under their fancy ruffles. I helped Dot out of ber five (!) layers of clothing, and slowly ber body revealed itself. Be stared at me, terrified, as I ran my hands over ber.

  Naked, Dot was even more gorgeous than dressed. I couldn't stop swallowing. Be was all long sinews and soft skin. Ber body was much the same shape as mine, or any other human, but slender where mine was stout. And be had all those extra appendages, where I only had holes.

  "What does this one do?” I pointed to a long vine that curled out from Dot's sternum.

  "It's, uh, it's my zud, for manning a spirer. They have an opening on that part of their bodies just for pilots, called the duz. It takes three days, and there are fifteen required positions.” It went on like that. The three bony prongs sticking out just below ber stomach were for manning a breeder, and ber thighs had matching lumps, which could expand to man an outringer. No matter what your dar, Dot had a way to man you. Just like I could woman to all the other dars.

  "Don't you want to see my, uh, my tharn?” Dot gestured to ber lower back, where the outie that matched my innie was quivering with excitement. Be started to turn around, but I stopped ber. Just being so close to ber naked body was making my harnt throb, opening and closing spasmodically like a busted airlock.

  "Not really,” I said. “There's no rush. And I'm curious.” I tried stroking some of the tendrils and spokes coming from the front of Dot's body. Dot moaned with pleasure, but they didn't grow any bigger, because I was the wrong dar to excite them. Pheromones.

  "Don't you want me to, uh, to man you?” Dot looked from ber naked body to the quicksuit I was still wearing. It kept ber from seeing that my lumbar region was soaked.

  "Nope. I don't woman. But I'll man you if you want."

  I didn't think it was possible for Dot's eyes to get any bigger, but they did. Ber eyes were as big as my thumbs.

  "Pilots always man, dailys always woman. That's just how it is."

  "That's not how I play. You have openings. I have tools. And fingers.” My pinky was almost too big for Dot's mouth, but I made it fit. Be sucked on it, half moaning and half gulping. I felt like I was going to implode, I was so skin-crazy.

  * * * *

  I left Dot naked and flushed, thanking me through bewildered tears. No more poetry, thank god.

  I figured after that, Dot would leave me alone. I might have an even worse reputation than before, depending on what people heard. But that could be a good thing, and maybe some of the dailys would respect me a little more when they heard I'd manned a pilot.

  I had to giggle to myself when I thought those words. I manned a pilot! Whatever came next would totally be worth it.

  "You did what?” Idra hissed. Y dragged me further away from the other dailys, just in case they had super-hearing. We were in the noisiest canteen, with the crispiest deep-fried bog-oysters. (Don't tell anyone I told you this, but those things aren't oysters. They grow on the coolant ducts, they're a kind of fungus.) The canteen's walls had been bright red when we'd left the Cluster, but by now they were maroon, and the floors were sticky no matter how much we mopped.

  "You heard me.” I giggled again. Normally, Idra was the giggler and I was the frowner. Oh, this was so worth it.

  "How could you? I always knew you were ... unnatural. But this? You could be killed! You could be killed and nobody would ever say anything. Stop laughing, Mab! I don't know what I'd do. I don't want to lose you. If Dot tells anyone, if be even whispers it, they'll just erase you! I couldn't bear that. Mab, why didn't you think about me before you went and threw everything away?"

  It went on like that, Idra keeping yr voice low enough that none of the other dailys had a clue. It was so weird, I had to go and man a pilot to find out that Idra loved me too. Love might be too strong a word, but whatever. You get the idea.

  "Idra, calm down. Be's not going to tell anyone. What's be going to say?"

  "Exactly. What is be going to say? Think about the position you put ber in. After weeks of public courtship, you agreed to meet ber in private. Everyone is going to want to know what happened. And be is going to say ... what? That you manned ber? That be manned you? That you rejected ber? What?"

  Why did things have to be so complicated? Be wanted me, so I took ber. Why wasn't that the end of it? But even as I was reassuring Idra that everything was fine, I felt another sensation, as unfamiliar as my harnt's opening had been. They could erase me any time they wanted. I felt weak inside.

  * * * *

  "Oh chaste Mabirelle! Oh cruel, virtuous Mabirelle, that withstood temptation's nearness with yr far-seeing gaze! How can we praise your inviolate harnt, O Mabirelle?"

  I was as shocked as anyone else. Apparently, I wasn't a crazy slut, I was a chaste virgin. Who had cruelly denied Dot's advances even though we were in a tiny padded and sound-proofed tube. Though Dot importuned me, I preserved my virtue. Dot proved this by showing someone that ber tharn retained its outer membrane, which meant it had never been inside me.

  I didn't even know that a pilot's tharn had an outer membrane. You learn something new every day.

  As the story went, I had arranged the song-booth meeting as an elaborate test to see if Dot could respect my chastity in such close quarters. As if Dot would have been capable of overpowering me anyway! And now that Dot had passed the test, I had agreed to hear ber pair-bonding proposal.

  I was grateful to Dot for coming up with an explanation of the facts that didn't require anyone to toss me into the Inner Axis. But proposals? The way Idra explained it, I wasn't committed to pair-bonding with Dot, just hearing ber suit.

  Nobody even knew how pair-bonding would work between a pilot and a daily. It wasn't very likely that I'd be able to go live with Dot, and the idea of Dot trying to share my bunk in a room full of twenty dailys made me giggle. With no children and no property, it was mostly a fancy license for Dot and me to do what we'd already done in that song-booth. Except maybe the other way around.

  So this time I had to go up to the pilot quarter, where the air is purer and the gravity lighter. Gleaming star-charts on all the walls, varvet covering every surface. I had to keep
ducking to avoid the little nozzles spraying perfumey crap and aromatherapy at me. I usually wore my bandanna around my mouth and nose when I cleaned around here, but I figured Dot might take it as an insult.

  "Hey,” I said to Dot. “Thanks, for coming up with a good story. You're good at that, huh? Telling stories. I have to kick myself to keep from believing the stuff you say about me, and I know myself pretty well."

  Dot started saying it was all true, and then some. Be wore even more layers than last time, if that was possible, and sat cross-legged on the edge of a massive crescent-shaped couch on the edge of a fake gravity well. You could toss things into it and watch them shrink to a singularity, but it was just an illusion. Dot didn't need to wear the extra buckles, since I would hardly molest ber with five chaperones watching us from just outside earshot.

  "Anyway, I'm grateful to you. Which is why I'm here,” I said, sitting a decent distance away from ber on the crescent thingy.

  "Mabirelle, because I love you so, I want to be totally honest with you,” Dot said. That sounded like a good idea, so I nodded. Be went on: “I told you the truth before, when I said there was no hidden agenda here. But there is something you don't know. Can you keep a secret?"

  "You have no idea how many secrets I've kept,” I said. “You can trust me, don't worry."

  Dot had to pause to offer me chocolates and little cameos, and order up fancy music. Then be went on. “The spirers think they've developed a much more accurate long-range scanning technique by combining stellar resonance and high-spectrum ghosting.” Be waited for me to murmur my understanding, then went on. “We think it's dead."

  "What's dead?” At first I thought he meant the little dove-hen I was holding.

  "The planet. Our colony world. Coriolanus, or whatever they're calling it this week. The breedpods won't function there, the breeders won't be able to sustain a new generation."

  "So we left the Cluster for nothing. We're sailing towards nothing. This, all of this, is all for nothing.” I gestured around, to indicate the whole City.

  "Yes."

  "Can we turn back?” I already knew the answer before be shook ber head, but it still felt like a crack in my gut. Be started talking about desperate alternatives: slingshot maneuvers, stellar recharges, increased dark-matter efficiency, but I was still saying “dead world” to myself, over and over. “Dead world."

  "I can't stand it among the other pilots any more, or any of the upper dars. The spirers with all those fingers, with their base-27 cleverness. The breeders, tending those breedpods as if they're going to amount to something. It all makes me feel so hopeless. But when I'm with you, it's different. I feel alive. Like life is worth something after all."

  I started to ask why we couldn't tell everyone the truth, but that was a stupid question, and I don't ask stupid questions. If I thought people in this City were crazy now, just imagine if they knew they were trapped and it was pointless.

  "Love,” I muttered. “Fucking love. It can't save you from shit. It's just anesthetic."

  "Maybe,” Dot said. “But it's life-saving. Mabirelle, I meant everything I said before. Your beauty, your wisdom, the longing inside me. It wasn't a pantomime, or a distraction from my existential crisis. It was itself. I love you, and I can't bear to be away from you."

  I didn't love Dot, but I liked ber more and more. Even though be had left me in an ugly spot. I could turn ber down, but then what? I could spend the next few decades among the dailys, knowing we were going nowhere. The dailys would never treat me the same after this, once I went from being the romantic heroine to being the fool who spurned a pilot. They might never let me touch them again. And I wasn't sure I could go back to being who I'd been, even if they'd let me.

  I took a deep breath and looked around this foolish room. I couldn't help laughing, and then I had to reassure Dot that I wasn't laughing at ber. “Sorry, sorry. It's just all this. How can you live like this? It's ridiculous."

  "I'm used to it, I guess,” Dot said. “You know what they say about pilots, we're not like other people. I know everyone makes fun of us behind our backs."

  "Yeah, but not as much as they make fun of the spirers.” I got my giggles under control and then looked into Dot's eyes, which looked like they could swallow me whole. “Listen, I can't live here. But I can't go back either. Can you make me a little love-nest, like in those dumb dreamliminals? A little place where I can live and you can visit? Not in the daily quarter, but not here either."

  Dot thought about it for a moment, then started rattling off the various lavish apartments in the interstices between the City quarters, where I could live in luxury. Eventually, be came up with something a bit more realistic, but still comfortable. Even if I was going to be a kept daily, I didn't want to be over the top.

  "I guess we can give it a try,” I said. “Just two more things. I want my friend Idra to come live with me. So I don't go nuts with loneliness when you're not around. Y needs yr own space, so y can entertain whoever y's madly in love with this week. And the other thing is, I won't woman to you. I can think of a few other ways to get rid of that pesky membrane on your tharn, don't worry. But I just don't like the idea of back-to-back sex, it's too weird. Oh, and my name is Mab, not Mabirelle or anything else. Okay?"

  It wasn't the kind of courtship Dot had had in mind. And when the minstrels sang of our pair-bonding and the dreamliminals recreated it, they portrayed it very differently. The quivering Dot, the beautiful unyielding Mabirelle, the hours of ardent supplication before I finally consented to turn my back on ber and become ber mate, all that crap. I had to bite my tongue whenever people started carrying on. But I was starting to learn that you had to leave people their romantic illusions.

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  Going to France

  Maureen F. McHugh

  In the beginning, there were only the three of them and I had met them quite by accident. The man sitting in the prow of the skiff was a short, brown-haired Englishman. He was smiling in a self-deprecating way. He was hunched forward and he looked a little gray. I thought he was scared but trying not to make a big deal out of it. I gathered he had been sick, although he didn't say so directly. He looked a little like a refugee, I thought. It was some sort of thing about his heart, maybe? Not a heart attack, but perhaps angina. I was worried for him and so was the red-haired woman he was with.

  "You need to eat,” the red-haired woman said. “Have another one of the granola bars.” She was direct and not sentimental. She didn't fuss. They didn't talk much.

  "How long have you lived in the States?” I asked the Englishman.

  "Eighteen years,” he said. “My family says I sound like an American."

  He didn't. He had a neat little Van Dyke beard. He worked in California, doing something in the television industry. One of those mysterious credits at the end, AGD Assistant. Best Boy.

  The breeze plucked at his shirt, a cotton, short sleeved thing, faded looking but clean. Where had they done laundry?

  The red-haired woman had a kind of crisp confidence about her. She wasn't British. She was a paralegal from California. The third woman they had just found traveling through Nevada. I steered the boat out into the Atlantic. The sea was just a little choppy and gray, a very Atlantic early morning, I thought.

  There was something wrong with the third woman. She was young, maybe twenty? She was short and she looked wrong. Not Down Syndrome, maybe autistic? She never spoke. The other two included her without particularly looking at or speaking to her. It was just that they all had this thing in common, that they could fly. They had come east across the U.S., flying by day, like hitchhikers or something, only not needing rides. They were going to fly to France. Since they couldn't actually fly when they were sleeping, this was dangerous and yet they felt they had to. They didn't talk about it. But the Englishman was the most worried. He had been brushed by mortality, and the crisp woman seemed caught up in dealing with logistics, and the autistic one was just pure compulsi
on.

  The little outboard motor puttered. I asked the Englishman if he had been to Paris. “Years ago,” he said. “Back in the seventies. When I was a student, before I came to the States. Disco and all that."

  I wondered why they could fly. I wished I could fly. I had had flying dreams. I had met them coming down the street in the early early morning and the crisp woman had asked me if I knew someone who could take them out to sea. They were empty-handed, except that the crisp woman had a fanny pack. The autistic one was wearing a long red dress, burgundy really, the hem dirty. She had those soft, naturally red lips that some children have. The kind that make me feel that perhaps there is too much saliva involved.

  I asked them why they needed to go out to sea and the crisp woman said they needed a head start on their crossing. They didn't hide that they could fly. I thought they were tired of hiding and traveling to get to the ocean and, now that it was so near, they were just shedding things, to become their own essential selves and their compulsion. They showed me how they flew, the woman leaning her head back and spreading her arms a little away from her sides and then just rising. She went up about five feet and then dropped back down to land on the sidewalk, next to the neighbor's wall which was covered with bougainvillea, now bright red in the pale and slanted morning light.

  "How are you going to cross the Atlantic?” I asked.

  They just shrugged. “We don't know,” the Englishman admitted.

  What was I going to do, call the police? So I walked down to the beach with them and then they climbed into my little aluminum skiff, the Englishman sitting slightly hunched in the prow. I gave him an aspirin and a granola bar and gave the other two granola bars, too. They were nice in a distracted sort of way. I felt as if I were smuggling refugees, maybe off a Caribbean island in the dawn of an insurrection, a bloody revolution that would rise up against anyone perceived as a colonial. It was a funny little fantasy.

  When we had gone out about a mile I saw some other boats, clustering. The Englishman, the crisp woman and I saw them and we headed for them. They bobbed a bit, clustered together, all different kinds of boats but most of them bigger than mine. It turned out that there were about eighteen of the flyers, all drawn to the Atlantic and needing to fly to France. I recognized one of them—my high-school American Literature teacher, a small and very quiet woman who looked, appropriately enough, a little like Emily Dickinson and who I hadn't seen in over ten years. She was wearing a cardigan sweater and white pants and looked birdlike. She smiled at me, but in a kind of courteous way. I didn't think she recognized me. I had changed since then. A lot more than she had.