Riff met Mama at The Nozzle as soon as she regained composure from the drug Mama foisted on her. It took nearly a week before she was able to face others. She told the producers she wasn’t feeling well. They sent a basket of bluish fruits and a get-well card with a creature she did not recognize holding colorful circles attached to strings.
The room came back into focus, and her nostrils and sinuses were swollen. A small trickle of blood ran down the back of her throat, and her nose whistled as she tried to suck in air. The end of her familiar tendril poked through her nostril and another slid from under her bottom eyelid, caressing her iris.
She grabbed a gauzy veil from her selected outfits drawer and draped it over her shoulders and head to hide the throbbing creature. Her room seemed smaller, the cream walls tighter. Al’s section was bare and they were conspicuously absent. Even their workspace for designing and requesting the bodily alterations for Riff was stripped bare. A single white ribbon lay furled on the soft pink chair shaped like a tongue.
Riff shrugged and shuffled down the spiraling hallway toward the center spot where she saw Phobos first rise.
Mama leaned against the railing with another woman Riff had never seen before. She was old. Riff hadn’t seen an old person since she was back on Earth. Her white hair flowed down over her thin brown arms, and static clung in spiderwebs to the rough fabric of her tunic. Her eyes had been removed and replaced with shining cobalt orbs inset into silver filigree that slid and turned independently of one another. Her belly and her back both arched forward like ram’s horn.
“¿Es ella?” The Crone asked Mama.
“Sí.” Mama steepled her fingers over Riff’s cheekbones and pressed. A stream of black ooze trickled down her philtrum.
“Dios mío, es joven,” the old woman said.
“Mija, listen to me, your familiar needs to be milked. That’s why it’s hurting like this. This is Curandera Morena, como un doctor, a healer. Ok? She is here to help. Ok?”
Curandera Morena flicked a sweet-smelling substance on her face and pressed her thumbs against the bridge of her nose. A screw of pain drove into her forehead as the familiar shifted in her nasal cavity. Curandera Morena passed a small rod attached to her long opaque fingernail over Riff’s eyeball. Another wave of pain clotted behind her eye. Her right nostril stretched as the tendril pressed its way out, ribboning down her cheek into the Curandera’s hand in a coil. The pressure released behind her eyes and her vision cleared.
Mama caught her breath as the familiar plopped into its full, impossible form. It glittered with mucus and heaved with foam. Curandera Morena massaged it, singing softly and blowing on its single ocular bulb, her own artificial eyes swaying in her head. Her wrinkled hands firmed, the liver spots disappearing, and the nails becoming clear and white again. Tears flowed from her eyes.
“I want her back, Mama.”
“Her? Interesting.”
Riff felt as if someone had cut off her right hand.
“Please, put her back.”
Curandera Morena slid the familiar into a transparent orb filled with a milky liquid and swirled it so that it sloshed over the creature. The familiar buzzed and squeaked as the liquid puffed and steamed around it. Riff felt the coldness on her own skin and tried to snatch the orb from the old woman. Mama wrapped her arms around her from behind and hissed in her ear, “Be still! You don’t understand what’s going on. Hush. The sniffers will hear you.”
The liquid turned lavender and bubbled out of the hole in the top of the orb, dripping over the sides. Mama released her, pushing her aside, and cupped her hands under the dripping liquid. Curandera Morena chanted and gripped her right fingernail in her teeth and tore it off. Blood oozed from the root, dark and slow. Curandera Morena traced the blood over Mama’s forehead in a long horizontal line and then held the bleeding digit over the orb. The hissing stopped, and Riff’s familiar froze as the liquid turned muddy. The sun stood cold and far in the amber sky. Curandera Morena tipped the orb back into her mouth, swallowing the liquid down. The sagging skin on her neck leaped up and down with each swallow. Her false cobalt eyes clouded to steel gray as she fixed them on Riff.
Riff stood paralyzed with shame as Curandera Morena walked into her mind, hunting memories. Riff existed twice. Inside and outside. Mama still knelt under Curandera Morena’s cupped palms. Curandera Morena stood motionless. The winds outside The Nozzle were suspended in great sweeping veils of red dust. Inside, she stood in a place with a roof of shifting green light. Creatures shrilled in the distance in burps and chirps. The ground was soft under her feet.
Other Curanderas, identical to Curandera Morena, draped in black and hung with shining claws, drifted from every side, closing into a tight circle around them. Each carried a human skull in front of them. The eye sockets glowing a warm yellow.
“I am looking for she who wears the pearls of the human heart. Red, red they shall be and adorned in snakes she shall be. She is facing herself. She is bearing us all in her womb.”
“I don’t know who that is, Curandera,” Riff said.
“You must take me to her.”
“How? I don’t know who that is.”
“Come now, she is larger than any one person. She is not a person. She chooses a vessel. She chooses a speaker. You have met her. Your familiar told me. Give me your hands.”
Curandera Morena took Riff’s hands in hers, which were no longer young, but gnarled and wrinkled, and turned them palm up to peer at them.
“Tu hermano, ¿dónde está?”
“That’s a bad word,” Riff said, repeating Al.
Curandera Morena grew tall and straight, her white hair whipping behind her. Her tunic tore as she expanded, leaving her naked and tall. Her pendulous breasts and rounded stomach grew, grazing Riff’s face as her stooped shoulders broadened and cracked, and her spindly arms ended in head-sized hands tipped with yellowing fingernails.
“Speak it. Where is your brother?” Her voice was rounder, larger. She grabbed Riff’s arms, holding them fast to her sides.
“Somewhere really cold. It was white. There was a bunch of frozen water. Not an ocean, but the other one.”
“A lake?”
“Yes.”
“Take me there.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Sí, se puede. Ahora.” Curandera Morena loosened her grip on her and stared into her eyes with the strange blank orbs.
Riff gathered her thoughts under this strange shifting green canopy and imagined the lake with its deep blue fissures and gouts of steam in the distance. She imagined Rasp’s body and her body, blended and met. She imagined MOTHER’s voice in her head. The shifting light greens above her began to morph into the thin dark gray of the moon. She did not know it was a moon before.
“La luna de Enceladus,” Curandera Morena crooned.
She imagined Saturn, heavy and yellow, ringed in white ice on the horizon. Glutted with gases and swirling across space. Luxurious and slow.
“Hablamos con la madre ahora. Llama.”
Riff opened the channel in her mind, like before, and called. Nothing.
“I think I have to talk through Rasp.”
“¿Quién es Rasp?”
“My brother.”
“Call him, niña. Speak through him. The Mother has many children. Un niño y una niña. She needs a warrior and a gatherer.”
“Mama gave me a drug before.”
“Only a learning tool. Call him here on the ice. Imagine him. Think him here.”
Riff pushed to remember him on the ice, the fog inside his helmet. His strange body with peculiar strength. Nothing.
“Remember him elsewhere. Más fuerte,” Curandera Morena hissed.
Riff was inundated with a memory from when they were very young, back on Earth in The Before.
They sat on a bed in a small place. His bedroom. His bed. Red triceratops and green tyrannosaurus rexes battled on a white background on his bedspread. A tank glowed blue from the other side of the room. Rasp held a palm-sized furry creature with eight appendages in his hand. His name was something else then. Not Rasp. Hers too. She couldn’t bring it up. The creature’s eight glossy black eyes stared back at her. He offered it to her to hold. She touched its round bottom and squealed. The creature backed up, crawling backward over his arm. Green stars glowed on his ceiling. A knock came at the door, and a man walked in. He was dressed in a uniform, green and mottled. They hadn’t seen him for a long time, she remembered. They were afraid of him. He kneeled on the ground beckoning them to him. His arms spread apart, his eyes wide and shining.
“It’s me. It’s Daddy. Papa.”
His voice sounded desperate. He looked thinner than they remembered. Browner. More creases between his brows, around his mouth. A different version of he who lifted them onto the kitchen countertop while he microwaved his coffee. Mama hung back in the dark hallway, her arms crossed.
“See? Ellos no te recuerdan.”
“Have you only been speaking Spanish to them? Jesus Christ, I work for the government.”
“So do I.”
Rasp wrapped his arm around Riff’s shoulders and pulled her close to him. His arms and ribs hard against her. The eight-legged creature perched on his shoulder.
He whispered, “Go to both of them. Go stand between them.”
She looked up at him and back at them and stood up. The memory faded there, leaving her standing alone with Curandera Morena in a vague echo of the bedroom aching with loss for her familiar. Curandera Morena held out her sharp hand to Riff and gestured toward the shifting bay doors at the end of the memory.
“Vámonos. Está bien. No te preocupes.”
Riff felt the eyes of Mama on her as she and Curandera blinked back to Mars. She was holding the old hand and felt the fragile bones underneath, draped in thin spotted skin.
Mama’s eyes flicked from Riff to Curandera Morena.
“¿Así?”
“Escúchame, la niña no está lista.”
Mama pursed her lips. Her fist shot out like a snake, clipping Riff’s cheekbone. Riff reeled backward, knocking the back of her head against Curandera Morena’s nose. Mama’s cold black eyes welled with tears.
“I thought you were my daughter. Why can’t you do this? Are you stupid?” Mama pulled her hand back as if to strike her again, but dropped it. She spun away into the dark hallway and disappeared. A bruise, blue-purple, was hiding behind the pink mark Mama left on her cheek. Damaging Corporation property carried a heavy penalty. Mama could be sent to Elder Female labor in the Venusian processing plants. Even Corporation marketing encouraged the image of camp labor as a deterrent. The streams always had dead-eyed women covered in radiation sores apologizing for their sins. Begging for retirement.
Riff turned to Curandera Morena, who chuckled behind a balled piece of fabric, spotted with blood, that she clutched against her laughing cough.
“Why are you laughing, Abuela?”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“Have you ever seen an old woman here?”
“What?”
“Tonta. There are no old women here.”
Curandera Morena’s blood turned silvery and her back cracked into ramrod straightness. Her arms grew three lengths, and tiny screens fell in a cascade from her mouth, each etched with a moment of human shame. Men in a red desert clinging to a detached body part, weeping to an old god. Women curled around one another in windowless rooms, touching bruises and secret blood. Children dividing bowls of maggots picked from the bodies of this cracked skin war. Dogs being skinned alive. Screaming. Protein. Protein. Protein from whence we came. Protein for whence we go.
“Bruja,” Riff said.
“Sí, I am the witch of death. My spells are remembering this. My spells are to remind you about what you are.”
“Are you a robot?”
“I am not a robot.”
“Are you an android?”
Curandera Morena tucked her slick hair behind her ears and crouched to retrieve the blinking screens.
“Ayúdame, por favor.”
Riff knelt beside her and swept the screens into the palm of her hand, each blinking a tiny recollection of suffering. Her stomach churned with the shifts, the vacillations of her own internal size and structure.
“Are you an android?” Curandera Morena asked her.
“No. I am a human girl.”
“How do you know this, mija?”
Curandera Morena slipped out of her skin and beneath it was slick black formlessness that swirled and drained into the floor vents beneath The Nozzle. A wisp of gray mist was all that was left of her. A thickness rose in Riff’s throat, and tears welled behind her eyes. The tiny screens biting into her palm. Tears not muted by chems or flashing screens. Strictly forbidden. Self-indulgent. Tears were decadent and luxurious.
¿Dónde está Mama?
She was thinking in that language again.
***
My Dearest Son,
That address always looks so formal, but here in The Black, formality is craved by us all. You stop saying words like “please” and “dearest” and “excuse me” when you are crammed together in a vessel so tight that you can smell one another, and then you cannot, because you are so used to it. I miss manners.
My mother insisted on manners, and despite my uncles’ machinations to entertain themselves by teaching me crude gestures and mannerisms, she succeeded. Boot camp was hard for someone like me. Like us? I wish I knew you more. Your hair is as black as an Incan night and your skin like the red clay our forefathers hoed and turned. You are the son of kings, mijo. The gods of our fathers that demanded blood did not demand our blood for reasons known only to them. And if it is to be believed that they are and see time and space all at once, like a room on a reflective silver bowl, it stands to reason that they kept our blood in our veins for a purpose.
Perhaps you have wondered why I have not discussed your sister. Is she also not of the blood of kings? I do not wish that you think me to be opaque, at least not purposefully. We will discuss your sister today. We will not mince words.
You see, human gestation takes around nine months from the time of conception, and while your sister does bear a formidable resemblance to me, it seems unlikely that I am her father based purely on timing. Your mother claims otherwise and even insisted on a DNA test. Is this too much to be speaking about with one’s son? I’m not certain you will see this correspondence anyway. I thought that this was crass and decided to accept your sister as mine, despite my doubts. Anyone who is brave enough to climb into bed with your mother deserves to have a bit of cake to both eat and have.
She claimed the medical professionals we entrusted with her reproductive health, ones licensed by the contracted private entities, were working with shark DNA to achieve parthenogenesis, that is, the ability for her to give birth to an exact replica of herself. A clone if you will, though that term is considered gauche these days. I worried about her mental health some days. Sometimes she seemed unstable and paranoid. Other days she was the sharpest person I had ever met.
I think it is only fair and important to note that some of us crave stability and need to have trust in institutions to achieve that equilibrium. Others question and push, and in their efforts to find cracks in the institutions, they burrow into the sides creating the cracks. I do go on, don’t I? My original promise of not issuing advice seems to have been an empty one.
Did you know that I was beaten to within an inch of my life once for reading? Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I was beaten because a love of things denied to our people somehow meant my love for our people and traditions were diminished. That was not and is not the case. I ask them now, as I drift safely through space, can you not love more than one child? Let me tell you the story. Stories are better teachers anyway.
When I was a child, many schools were still regulated by what was called state governments. I know my permissions are somewhat restricted as to what I can disclose to you, but suffice it to say that the name Los Estados Unidos or United States came from the idea that certain areas of designated land were given a set of their own rights as well as the ability to create laws and govern within the purview of the federal government. I am doing it again, mijo. Perhaps my overexplanation contributed to my sound thrashing some too. Engine room gin blurs me.
Let me try again. I will be simpler this time.
I was very young, perhaps seven or eight years old, and our teacher had a hidden shelf of non-contract-approved paperback books. I didn’t know what a non-contract-approved book was at the time, only that it didn’t have ads and was not digitized at all. The paper was yellow along the edges and smelled of earth and dust and ink and age.
Mrs. Davis-Martinez was informed by the school that I had finished up the contract-approved reader assigned to our district and that in my hunger and haste had gotten Miguel, my older brother – your wildest uncle – to hack into the Pay Per Read site and steal over one hundred volumes of higher level texts. I had devoured only five books when the school suspended my account. The school told Mrs. Davis-Martinez that I was to be punished for property crime and that she should choose suitable circumstances for my contrition, preferably in the form of meaningless and dull labor after school hours.
She informed the administration that she had many torturously dull tasks for me to do after school. The administration informed my mother, who whipped me silently with the flexible sole of a green flip flop. I realized later that that whipping was different than her usual ones, which were loud and righteous. This one seemed unenthusiastic, like her heart wasn’t really in it. My mother was a very wise woman.
After class, the other children rushed from their desks in a flurry of shiny snack wrappers and mesh backpacks to go home to their favorite streams while I sat, looking at Mrs. Davis-Martinez picking up the shreds of plastic left behind. She gave me instructions on how to help her. I picked up trash, straightened desks, and did my homework under her eye. Her wife came in with a lunch bag with Spider-Man on it. It had these cubes of cheese that were white and yellow swirled in it and a plastic bag of green grapes in it. Soon the janitor cut the lights in the hallway. I had never known school could be this still.
We continued our little routine for a week or so, when one afternoon Mrs. Davis-Martinez waved me over to her desk.
“Come see. I have something here you may like.”
She opened a big metal drawer with rails that ran along the sides.
“It used to be used for paper files, but now we have everything in the cloud,” I remember her saying. To this day I am still unclear on the meaning.
She lifted a false bottom from the drawer and placed it on her desk. It seemed very romantic to me at the time, like a spy novel. It was filled with hard copy books. Their covers were softened and creased. Pictures of wolves and soldiers and women balancing pots on their heads dotted the covers. She reached in and retrieved a particularly worn copy of a book with a cover that had two crossed guns over a gray and dark blue uniform. I was very afraid, because I loved school, you see? I loved Mrs. Davis-Martinez. She was the most beautiful woman I knew, with her tight black curls and dun skin. I thought she would go to jail or be sent back to Mexico. Many of us were being sent back at that time before the secessions and annexations.
I said to her, “Mrs. Davis-Martinez, is this illegal? Will we go to jail? Can they send you back to Mexico for this?”
She laughed.
“My family is from Honduras, first of all. Secondly, I could get into a little legal trouble, but it would just be a licensing fine. I could get into very big trouble with the Charter’s Teacher’s Association though, so you do have to be very quiet about this, ok?”
“Is it mine?”
“It is yours until you finish it. Then you bring it back and I will let you choose another one. No more hacking into the school’s computer, ok? Now put it in your bookbag.”
Now, it is important for you to know that in The Before, there was more than just one corporation, and many people were employed by many corporations and some were not employed by anyone at all, if you can imagine that.
Work gives people a sense of purpose, a sense of drive. When I joined the Marines, my very first drill instructor told me “discipline is kindness.” I tell you all of this because it is important to always understand context. The context of this time was that some people voluntarily or involuntarily did not work, and that meant that the kindness of discipline was unavailable to them, so they had a hard time being kind to others. Do you understand my meaning, hijo?
The offspring of these people were not conditioned to the kindness of discipline themselves, and so they lashed out when they saw that kindness, and other kindnesses being bestowed on others. They sensed the unfairness in it, I think.
And so, when I left with that book tucked into my bag, in a way, I was inviting what happened next. I sat down at the bus stop waiting for the Number 30 bus and took out the book. Opening and closing it, pressing my thumb to the soft edge of the pages. The bus stopped for me, but I did not notice, so engrossed was I in the pages. The sodium lights buzzed orange above me, lighting the pages. I did not notice the danger. The boys craving the discipline someone had just handed me, because of my bright eyes perhaps, emerged. They strolled from around the buildings, eating Hot Cheetos, their eyes landing on the symbol of their insecurities and pain.
“Reading a book?” The largest of them said. “Book” shot out of his mouth followed by a spray of crumbs.
He grabbed it from my hands and pushed me off the bench. I flailed at them. My fists landed nowhere. They grabbed me by my collar and punched into my face and throat and arms and chest. The shockwaves of their blows rattled my spine and my throat seized in anger and fear. My teeth clacked together as the largest one kicked the back of my head while I lay curled on my side. They dumped out my backpack, strewing my homework and my playing cards. I was trying to learn magic tricks. They took Mrs. Davis-Martinez’s book and tore the pages from it, scattering them into the thick, dark night.
I would not let them see me cry. And so I spat blood into their faces and howled like a dog, baring my teeth laved in purple-crimson. An abuela coming home from her own day of labor saw all of this and rushed toward us on short bowed legs, hurling odds and ends from her purse at the boys until they fled into the night. “¡La Lechuza! ¡La Lechuza!” They screamed into humming city night, their sneakers snicking on the concrete.
She approached me carefully, as if I was a wounded dog. I wept then. Tears mixed with blood and snot and dripped down the front of her green scrubs. Her name tag said: Francesca Ramos-Diaz M.D. University Medical Center. Her gray hair had come loose in the chaos and hung about her face in long steely loops. She retrieved her huge purse from the ground and pulled out a pair of purple nitrile gloves and some gauze.
“It is not too serious,” she said and dabbed at my head. “You will live to fight more pendejitos.”
I fell into her and hugged her around her thick middle. She pressed me back and looked at my face, turning my jaw and lifting my arms.
“You are ok. Just bruised. Can you see ok?” She took a pen light from her scrub pocket and shined it into my eyes. “Stop crying. You are ok.”
“Are you a doctor?” I asked her between sobs.
“If I’m not, then the medical board is in trouble,” she said under her breath. “Stop crying.”
“I missed my bus.”
“I can drive you home. Where do you live?”
I gave her my address, which I have forgotten. Strange the things we forget that we promise we will remember forever at the time. She picked up the torn cover of the book and put her pudgy hand on my back between my shoulder blades.
“This one was one of my favorites too. Don’t let those ignorant little fuckers stop you, ok? Fuck them.”
It was strange to hear these words coming from an abuelita’s mouth. Don’t misunderstand me, my son. I have heard the vilest things, the most colorful profanities come from my own abuela’s mouth. She would deny it. If she is still with us when you read this, do not ask her or you might receive a hurt lecture. But I had never heard them from an abuelita. Perhaps I should not call her an abuelita, I do not know if she had children or grandchildren to this day.
Her car had leather seats that warmed when you sat on them. It was pristine. No car seats or crushed Cheerios under the backseat. She pulled a towel from the trunk and laid it down on the seat before I sat down. It had dog hair on it and a picture of a smiling mermaid. We glided through the city, all bright orange and red lights blooming against the deep gray of the buildings.
I cried again, ashamed of my fright and crusty nose. Ashamed of the streets, parting in decay. Ashamed of the shredded book in my bag.
“Why are you crying? That Naproxen should be kicking in soon.”
“What will I tell Mrs. Davis-Martinez?”
She smiled faintly and crinkled her brow, amused.
“Rosa? Her wife is Nadia? Tall and blond? Some kind of white foreign lady? That’s your teacher?”
“Sí,” I said in Spanish. Like drinking water, swallowing the consonants.
“Don’t worry. I will call her tonight. We used to...” – her voice trailed for a moment – “know each other,” she finished.
My father stood on the stoop smoking a cigarette when we pulled up in her expensive car with clean seats. This was before they were replaced by those transdermal nicotine delivery systems. He approached her driver’s side door and thanked her in choppy English before she waved him off and answered in Spanish. His gratitude bore a touch of resentment. I could feel his hardened hand close around my upper arm as he pulled me toward the house where my mother peeked through the yellowing blinds. Dr. Ramos-Diaz leaned over and whispered, “Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo.” My father chuckled and loosened his grasp on me tucking me under his arm as we walked up to the porch. My eye had swollen shut at that point. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a Bud Light and gave it to me.
“Ponlo en tu ojo, hijo.”
My mother leaned in the kitchen doorway, her arms crossed.
“¿Qué te sucedió?” Her eyes glittered.
“Nada, mi amor,” my father said and nodded at her.
I did not understand this moment until I was a father myself. When I picked you up from the floor covered in nail polish. When I held your hand as the barber used trimmers on your night black hair for the first time. When you filled your pockets with seashells and stones. I needed to be there for you, but I could not refuse when they asked me to go to Enceladus. Do you understand, my son? We do not have the luxury to refuse these requests. The contract was signed. I signed the contract.
If you ever see this transmission, kill it.
I love you. I love your sister too, despite my earlier confessions. I love your mother.
Yours Truly,
Papa
***
The Holy Book™
Universal Old Text
Chapter 40 Verses 1-7
1 And Mechoben’s Father, who was called Erasure before the fall of His kingdom to His Son as was intended, did say unto His Son “Where have You gone and from whence did You come?” when Mechoben came into the house of Erasure after the setting of Sol.
2 “You know where I was, Father,” the Child said unto Him.
3 Mechoben’s tongue was sharp and quick and did anger His Father, who called upon Mechoben’s servant, Fortuner, and asked of Him “Where have you gone and from whence did you come?” and Fortuner said “Father of my Father, know this: Mechoben comes and goes and does well by You, but does well by Himself most of all.”
4 And so Erasure did place a TrackAKid sensor in Mechoben’s most prized CyRolex and did monitor His Son’s movements.
5 He found Him in the Temple of the New World Stock Exchange residing over the others, and they marveled at his knowledge of the Futures.
6 He said “My Son, I worried for Your productivity. You caused me much anxiety.” And Mechoben answered Him saying “Father, how was it that You missed Me? You knew I must be about the work of The Market.”
7 And so Erasure did leave The Son there and found His own portfolio to be increased tenfold, and He rejoiced and did bestow many blessings on Mechoben, as did The Market.