Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 Read online

  “You’re so different from us,” she continued. “Why would you have children so different from yourselves?”

  Ah, she was wondering the same about them. This reassured him somewhat. They had the same doubts, which meant they probably shared some basic values.

  Ojore took one sloshing step closer to the native. “Look at us, being propped up in our little toy suits against this planet’s gravity, the sun and the sea spray irritating our eyes and skin. We weren’t made for this world, but we can’t leave it. Ours was a one way trip. And even if we could, I don’t think we would. I love this world. So the best we can do now it allow our children to live and thrive here.” He rapped a knuckle on the full-body brace he’d been forced to wear for more than a decade now.

  Of course, there was no change in her expression, but something in her voice was slipping away like a half-remembered dream. “You do understand that it’ll be very difficult for you to be a part of your child’s life? The Mokoani live in large schools that roam this entire world. You can visit with your submersibles and you can dive with us when our migration routes take us close to the surface, but…” she didn’t finish, only slapped her great fluke against the surface of the water, the resulting waves unbalancing the two humans.

  Ignacio steadied himself by grabbing hold of Ojore. When the water settled he said, “We’ve spoken to other human parents of aquatic children and they say it’s tough, but the joy they get during those visits eclipses all the time apart.” He hated that he sounded like one of the brochures—like Dr. Nakamura—so he shrugged and added, “Besides, we can’t seem to have children of our own on this planet.”

  “Have you been a surrogate before?” Ojore asked, clearly trying to lift the scrutiny away from them.

  “No.” She provided no further information.

  It donned on Ignacio that there was no sign of this large school the marine creature had spoken of. There were no other towering spines on the horizon, no thrashing tails. Wahgohi was alone with these foreign primates. “Are you sure you want to carry something so different?” he asked, sympathetically. After all, it was her body that would play host to aliens. He wanted to shudder at the thought, but his exoskeleton held him tight. “Could you love something not entirely Mokoani?”

  “I’m not sure anymore,” her voice broke like waves, like his heart. She started to shove the ramp with her short pelvic fins, awkwardly squirming her bulk back into the sea. “I’m sorry,” she offered.

  “No wait!” Ojore fought the current her shifting immensity created and splashed toward her, reaching out to her cold, resplendent scales. “Let’s keep talking. We’re good people.”

  Ignacio went after him. Ice seeped into his chest as he moved deeper. He seized the struts of his husband’s exoskeleton and pulled him back with all his strength just as the sentient fish vanished beneath the waves.

  He held Ojore’s shivering frame. Another failure. More hopes dashed. How much of this could their relationship take? He knew the next few months were going to be hard. His eyes caught sight of the jeering protesters—the righteous childless—bobbing the distance and read, “This is unnatural selection!”

  “Why did you have to ask her that?” Ojore yelled through clattering teeth. There was more anger in it than Ignacio could bear.

  He closed his eyes. “I needed to know, all right? I need to know our child will be loved.”

  “You didn’t have to hit her with the heavy stuff on our first meeting!”

  “Look, she was right about one thing: we’re not going to be a huge part of our child’s life. If anything, we’re the surrogates here. I just want to make sure we pick the right mother, you know?”

  They held each other in the frigid artificial pond on a crushing alien world. No one spoke. Neither wanted to contact Nakamura and admit defeat. There was nothing but static and surf all around.

  Then a row of sapphire spines sliced though the gelatinous water.

  #

  Wahgohi was an ebony ghost floating in the darkness, swathed in a thousand pinpricks of bioluminescent microorganisms. Even though they were 2,900 meters under water, Ignacio couldn’t help but think of her as a gigantic starship moving through space, which was rather ironic given that at that moment he was more vessel than anything else.

  “What is she doing?” asked Ojore over their private channel.

  “Eating, I think.”

  Wahgohi carefully herded a shoal of shiny slippers with spurts of electromagnetism into her gapping mouth. Yemaya flitted around her mother, zapping slippers with enthusiastic bursts of static, disrupting Wahgohi’s careful work, but managed to swallow one herself.

  “I did it!” she broadcast her joy on all channels.

  “Good job!” Ojore shouted and snapped his cybernetic fluke, launching himself toward their daughter. They wrestled and played in the jade gloom, scaring away the rest of their lunch. He tried to hug her, clumsy in his rig—it was half spacesuit and half torpedo—but she giggled and evaded with the grace of a dolphin.

  “Do humans usually praise their fry for things that are expected or is this shortcoming specific to Ojore?” The translator was able to capture the exaggerated frustration in her voice, but insisted on referring to their child as fry.

  “Oh, we’re going to spoil her rotten.” Ignacio coasted up to Wahgohi, hoping his visor hid his smile. “Hard to believe it’s been three months now; sometimes it feels longer—living in this suit is getting old—but she’s growing up much too fast.” They had taken six months of parental leave to swim with Wahgohi and Yemaya, from the Mokoani spawning ground to the marginally warmer waters of the southern hemisphere. After that, their suits’ life-support system and paid time-off would expire and they would have to be airlifted back to their island.

  She expelled a blanket of tiny bubbles from beneath her scales, which meant she was laughing. “Full Mokoani young change a lot in their first few months, but then it all evens out. Don’t worry. You’re here for the formative period. How are you doing in that marvelous and hideous suit of yours?”

  “It’s jacked to my nervous system, so physically it’s not too bad, like a dull second skin, but I’m tired of eating paste and smelling myself.” He didn’t mention that he was even sicker of relieving himself into tubes.

  Yemaya zoomed into view and slammed into him, sending him rolling in the deep. Error alerts and safety alarms flashing in his vision. “Whoa, careful small fry, you’re almost bigger than I am in this getup.”

  “I don’t want you to go!” Her voice was entirely human, a three-year-old girl, by his inexpert estimate.

  His heart sank to the bottom of the trench and instantly popped with the pressure. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but he thought he saw a definite pout on her face. “We have to, Love, but we’re not leaving for a long time.” This is what Wahgohi had tried to warn them about on their first meeting. Biology and circumstance forced them to be part-time parents.

  “I’m going to miss you, Papi.” She tried to wrap her arms around him, but of course she couldn’t, not with her pectoral fins.

  “I’m going to miss you too, my little mermaid.” He gave her an inept hug.

  His daughter expanded her iridescent spines and sped away to lovingly crash into Ojore. Apparently she drew endless joy from the mayday signal of a failing environmental suit. Ignacio regained his barring and caught up to Wahgohi, trying to cruise within her slipstream.

  From a distance, Yemaya looked almost entirely Mokoani, but up close her face was more like a beluga whales’—he winced internally at the slur—but with definite traces of humanity. Compared to the flat alien features of her mother, her face beamed with expression and, if he squinted, he could see hints of Ojore’s large eyes and broad nose in it and the curve of his own mother’s lips.

  “You were right, Wahgohi. It’s going to be very hard not to be a part of your lives.”

  “It’s going to be hard for me as well. W
e Mokoani, like humans, are intensely social. I was…not very happy before our arrangement.”

  A memory bubbled up of other Mokoani carefully avoiding them at the spawning ground, giving them the kind of space you gave a nuclear reactor. “Why were you alone? Where is your school?” He was afraid she would say that humans had slaughtered them in their initial conflict, but the question was already eddying between them.

  A long time passed and, when their daughter was quite a distance away, she finally said, “They abandoned me.”

  “Why?” The last three months had made him comfortable enough with her to ask such a personal question.

  “I negotiated the treaty that allowed humans to stay on this world.” She rotated her fins in an exasperated shrug. “I understood you were here to stay. That you couldn’t leave, and, given your miraculous technology, that if we kept goading you, you would have annihilated us. I brokered a peace to save my school and they called me a traitor and chose to shun me.”

  Her scales puffed up as she sucked in a great volume of water. “For a long time I drifted about in despair, slowly descending toward the abyss until my only companions were the dirty, boiling hydrothermal vents on the oppressive sea floor. When hunger became unbearable, I forced myself to eat a few of the hard, unsatisfying crawlers that taste of bitter brimstone. After almost a year, my respiratory scales were aflame from the thick, sizzling sulfides, but I refused to leave the toxic safety of the smokers.

  “One day, when I was about ready to shove my head into the supercritical mouth of a crusty chimney and take a final scorching whiff of death, I caught a faint signal from a passing school decrying this new practice of hybridization. I floated up listlessly, weak but wanting to know more. It seemed impossible to me, but when reports of the first births began circulating the ocean, I thought, Humans owe me! They have gotten off too easy. I lost everything because of them and they have a responsibility to make this right!”

  “Do you resent us?”

  “I did at first…but when I observed the demonstrators on their little boats when we first met, I understood that you too have given up a lot to be here, to give me a school.”

  “It’s almost reassuring to know bigotry is universal. That no one species owns that particular trait.” Ignacio patted her side with a gloved hand and her scales rippled like a banner in the wind. He felt like a cleaner fish riding in the wake of a great white shark. They swam in silence for a while, both of them watching their child roughhousing with one of her fathers. Ojore loved to cavort with Yemaya and he took great pleasure in watching them play.

  Ignacio, on the other hand, loved to hold her and sing to her. When Yemaya was only a day old and still slurping up the nutritious mucus-like secretions of her mother, Ignacio got the urge to stroke her head and sing to her in his sweetest baritone. Wahgohi said it calmed her so he continued to do it.

  Ojore and Yemaya joined them and the four of them swam in their usual formation, a strange little school of non-fish. He reached out and took Ojore’s hand, trying to pull him along. He could hear the very human sound of panting over the comm. “Have fun?”

  “I’m wiped out. These alien microbes have colonized every nook and cranny of my suit. It’s getting harder to move.”

  Ignacio sighed and took a sip of fresh water from the tube in his helmet. It was another reminder of their short time together as a family, but no matter what, he thought, he had Ojore full-time. Would one child be enough for a being used to living with hundreds? Would it be enough for Yemaya? He had heard of new hodgepodge schools of mostly hybrid children and their interspecies parents, but would they accept Wahgohi? For the first time, he realized that he cared about her, about her happiness. She wasn’t just a floating egg sac—an anonymous surrogate—to him. She wasn’t even an intelligent, unfathomable monstrosity any more. She was family.

  “Are you okay?” Ojore’s concern oozed over their private channel.

  Ignacio wanted to be held in his big arms, anchored by muscles forged in Papua’s mighty gravity. Floating in this endless sea like flotsam was beginning to get to him. “Yeah, I’m just thinking.”

  “About our future?”

  “About their future.”

  He thought he saw his husband nod through the visor, but Ojore said nothing, only gave his gauntleted hand an encouraging little squeeze. Ignacio squeezed back and something subtle and human passed between them.

  “Wahgohi,” he coughed over the open channel. He took another sip of water, then reached out and grabbed one of the longer spines on her pectoral fin. It was ungainly and silly, but she didn’t shrug him off. The three of them were bound together like two small hydrogen atoms desperately clinging to a larger oxygen atom. Together they were creating something as fundamental and potent as water. “Would you like to have more children with us?”

  A plume of lime green bubbles exploded from her scintillating scales. Yemaya danced around them blissfully. Wahgohi wasn’t laughing—or she was—but she was also crying. It was an eruption of emotion. “Yes, husbands, I would like that very much.”

  ###

  Alex Hernandez is a Cuban-American science fiction writer based in South Florida, and the first of his family to be born in the U.S. His most influential experience with written science fiction was as a kid, when he checked out a collection of Isaac Asimov’s short stories from the public library and immediately connected with the author’s immigrant story. Perhaps because of that, the themes of migration or colonization and post humanism permeate his stories, which usually blend the subgenres of space opera and biopunk. His work has previously been published by Bean Books, The Colored Lens, and Interstellar Fiction.

  Forever Lights

  Peter Medeiros

  Dr. Lorena Hannish was good at a lot of things: theoretical physics, applied thermodynamics, advanced calculus, and the accordion. She was good at these naturally, almost without practice. "Practice," she said, "can help hone your talents, but it won't upset natural inclinations. You can't tell that to a bunch of MIT undergrads, but there you are."

  When Dr. Hannish was a girl, her father insisted she play soccer. She seemed to grow less coordinated every season until a busted knee in sixth grade ended her father's athletic ambitions for her, and made sure she would never again miss an episode of NOVA. She told me the one thing she practiced, foolishly, was getting her husband, the late Dr. Clifford Hannish, to shut up and let her do the talking. She practiced for years, and with no improvement.

  Dr. Hannish told me all this without turning from the passenger side window, though there was nothing to see but the glow of streetlamps in the distance. She paused, then added, "So what do you think?" The doctor asked questions aggressively.

  I told her my dad said I could be anything I wanted, with enough practice. I told her my seventh grade basketball team won states.

  "What do you want to be right now?" she asked. "The chauffer of a grouchy Nobel laureate, the 'Ice Queen of Clean Energy'? You want to be an underpaid driver freezing his ass off getting an old bat to a power station the middle of nowhere?"

  I said, "Ma'am, what I want to be is asleep."

  Dr. Hannish laughed and coughed and finally settled down in her seat and I could tell we wouldn't talk any more all the way to Wiscasset.

  I had not expected to see Dr. Lorena Hannish again. After her husband died, she sold off the beach house in Castine, Maine and told me straight off that she would end her days in the Florida home. Clifford died chasing one of their dogs into a snowstorm. She had watched him hobble after the mutt, stood in the doorway for twenty minutes, then went inside and dialed 911 and told them he was dead. Then she called me to get her to the hospital, because she didn't want to ride in the back of any ambulance and she wanted to stop for coffee on the way. This was nine o'clock at night. In this part of Maine, the Starbucks closes at eight.

  People asked me if she saw her husband's ghost, when it happened. If anybody could, they reasoned, it would be
her. I told them what Lorena Hannish always told me: "There's no such thing as ghosts." And when they started to protest, when they said that Dr. Hannish's work had more or less proven the existence of life or something after death, I'd add, as she always did, "Just because there's smoke, doesn't mean there's a gun."

  But she'd called me yesterday. First time I heard her voice in the year since Cliff's death. Now I was driving her from the airport to the Spiritual Residue Plant in Wiscasset. We passed beneath streetlamps that would never go out. She held a small black box in her lap, and a set of thick fuzzy headphones. I'll admit, I was curious. To the best of anyone's knowledge, Dr. Hannish and her husband hadn't so much as published an article in Scientific Monthly since they invented the SR turbines that solved our energy problems and stopped the oil wars. Or as some people said, since they'd saved the world.

  #

  I used to be a mall cop in South Portland, but nobody every pulled a gun on me until I started driving for the Hannishes. This was right after they bought the beach house. The two of them had arthritis and reflexes like molasses; they needed a driver. My older brother had worked in their lab in Cambridge, and he gave them my card. Lied and told them I was reliable. Lorena was exactly like she looked on the television: small, quiet, boiling with thoughts you wouldn't understand. Cliff, on the other hand, you could talk to. A guy's guy. He squinted at everything, had terrible posture, and he always wore this wide-brim camping hat he bought because he didn't want to look like summer people. It didn't work.

  The guy with the gun, it turned out later, had stalked them for a week before the incident. I hadn't noticed. I was waiting to pick up the couple outside The Hartstone Inn. Cliff was opening the door for Lorena, she was shooing him away with a cane, and this bozo in—no shit—a white jean jacket over a green hoodie pulls a goddamn Glock from his pants and yells that he wants to talk with his dead boy. I know you can do it, he says. A conspiracy theory nut.