Riff stood by Curandera Morena as she tore strips from Curandera Rubia’s cloak and laid them over the dead woman’s staring eyes. She had collapsed just as Enceladus materialized in the viewport, white-blue and still against the velvet of space. Riff had been teaching her how to make a NicDip by soaking wads of fabric in the last droplets from the Transdermal Nicotine Delivery System vials. She tucked a wet wad just under Curandera Rubia’s lower lip when the moon drifted into their eyeline.
Curandera Rubia wrapped her arm around Riff’s waist and pressed her bristly lips against her cheek when she saw the moon. She squealed and giggled like child, her spotted crepe paper hands gripping Riff’s. Then she fell to the floor.
Riff screamed and pushed the comm button. She had never seen anyone collapse. Their blood pressure, viral and bacterial load, and consciousness levels were monitored by the managers at the factory and GagGirls facility. It was considered detrimental to productivity to witness a lapse in bodily autonomy.
Curandera Morena and Curandera Peliroja glided over Curandera Rubia’s inert body. Her hair floated above the floor as the failing gravity drives ground and churned in the walls. Riff petted her white hair and smoothed her cheeks. The women encircled their still companion. Curandera Morena picked up her thin arm and pressed her pointer and middle fingers into the wrist. She laughed and then wailed.
The other Curanderas picked up the death cry and lifted Riff to her feet. Curandera Morena flicked a gauzy caul over the body and passed her hands over Curandera Rubia, pausing as she passed her hands under the nape of her neck.
The body lifted and jerked as Curandera Morena removed her fingers from behind the still head. A small opal coated in a thin layer of blood was stuck to the end of her middle finger. She nodded at Riff.
“This is the key. You are the keyhole,” she said.
The other Curanderas wrapped their arms around her and kissed her cheeks in the same place that Curandera Rubia did before she fell.
“I don’t understand,” Riff said.
“Curandera Rubia has sacrificed her protein and carbon so that you may enter the fold. You are now The Seer. And now you will eat the holy stone,” Curandera Morena said.
“The Seer?”
“You spoke with the holy MOTHER.”
“How did you know that?”
“Open your mouth, new sister.”
“But, I haven’t spoken to her in weeks.”
“That’s not relevant. You have been touched. Look.”
Curandera Morena held up her palm in front of Riff’s eyes. A silver eye blinked back at her, nestled into the curvature of the wrinkled flesh. The pupil reflected Riff’s image upside down. Her Shine-stuffed lips were returned to their original thin curve. The iris injections to lighten her eyes were swallowed by the black shadows of her own color. Her waist thickened again as the PlastiBond Internal Corset dissolved.
In the center of her forehead, a reflective eye identical to the one in Curandera Morena’s hand grew into a white paper bag that unfolded into thousands of crinkling petals that drifted down in a barrage of white noise. She reached up to touch the void in her head. Her fingers brushed a warm metal orb that bloomed in the place of the vacated eye. A razor-thin metal eyelid slid down over her finger and severed the tip. She jerked her finger away, gripping her thudding digit, and tried to scream. Instead of a wail, a thick black tendril oozed from her mouth and rose to the blinking metal orb in her forehead. It furled and unfurled like a baby’s hand reaching for some bright toy. Curandera Morena closed her hand into a fist in front of Riff’s nose and squeezed, the veins in her hands and arms lifting against her thin skin.
A black tendril snaked out of her fist, the blood opal perched on the end of it.
Curandera Morena’s voice hummed in her head.
“Accept the gateway.”
Riff leaned back and looked up. The ceiling had become the vastness of space above her. She opened her mouth.
Curandera Morena’s tendril twined around her own, layering and layering over and over into a kinetic wreath that churned into a frenzy. The opal turned over and over on top of the writhing circle. Riff felt her lungs filling and the void above her falling over her face like a caul. She fought for breath. She clutched at the matterless veil above her. She screamed against the churn in her throat. Everything. Everything expanding around her and drawing her body into it. Her atoms pulled away from one another, rending her into particles. A floating fortress appeared before her with a thin line of green light that pulled her disassociated pieces into something with form. It was not her body. It was genderless, cold, strong, and associative. Everyone spoke to her and through her. Curandera Morena’s voice, louder than the rest, came to the forefront.
“Escuchame. Accept the gateway.” The disembodied voice was replaced by the else-voices, none clamoring, all talking.
She drifted past the green line and into a diamond of pure white. She had no eyes, so they could not hurt from the bright hull of excited atoms. She had no skin, so it could not burn her. She had no self, so it could not frighten her. A being greeted her in the center of the diamond, and the being was her and the rest of they who comprised one another, and so they were all greeted and greeting all at once. The being touched the center of her and they asked without asking if she would accept the gateway.
She affirmed, and they affirmed, though she knew the choice was being made over and over again, infinitely, and without beginning or end.
The being unfolded and spread throughout the diamond, signaling through a scent pattern to follow. She unfolded her own molecules into the scent pattern of oily hair and spun on the wake of the being’s molecules. A wide sheet of static spread and then collapsed as the being moved through and past it. A memory of a white picket garden gate manifested and then shattered and collapsed as the unnamed They pushed a memory of the Pacific Ocean onto the static sheet.
The great dark blue hurled itself over into huge curls of white froth. The black pebbles under the memory of feet with little cold streams weaving into transparent vectors. The smell of it. Saline and fish. A blanket of heavy gray on the horizon. She struggled with her selfness, with her I, trying to force it into her familiar physicality. The ocean crumpled before her, the manifest sky tearing like a poster being ripped from the wall. The They vibrated in a molecular hum, reminding her of the nothingness of what she was at that moment. The opal, coated in Curandera Rubia’s blood, replaced the sun memory and spread across the sky memory. Every piece of it divided into geometric patterns and then into lines of color that surged into a cast net of hexagonal pinpricks. Swim. Swim. Swim.
She pushed her atoms into an obelisk and collapsed into the ocean, the remaining pieces of her and They combining into an orbital whirl. Her belly was filled and swollen with pregnancy. It glowed orange red. Her organs and bones silhouetted against the bright thing that turned within her. Her head pitched backward as her uterus contracted and the first star was born, oozing with plasma. Gas clouds gathered and whirled around them in a pale spiral. The star drifted toward her breast and hovered there. Light closed over her, and it fed from her body, expanding into a luminous corona. It spoke to her.
“DO YOU REMEMBER ME?” the star boomed.
“Are you MOTHER?”
“I am MOTHER.”
She reached down and touched her sagging stomach.
“Am I MOTHER?”
“You are MOTHER.”
“What do you want?”
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
She gazed at the shifting blue gray gases pouring off of the star and touched her face.
“I want to be free.”
“I WANT TO BE FREE.”
The star folded its gaseous cloud over itself, pulling the gauzy shawl over itself in folds.
“How do I do that? How do I become free?”
“FIND THE WIZARD.”
Riff felt her face flush with frustration in the face of this being encased in light. Her frustration grew with each opaque suggestion.
“Where is the Wizard? Who is the fucking Wizard?”
“YOU WILL FIND HIM AT HOME. HE IS LIKE YOU.”
And at that the threads of the gas cloud unraveled, and the star collapsed before her in a rush of cold blackness. She emerged, breathing in the recycled air of the ship. Her weightless body lifted and touched by the Curanderas. Something slithered over her temples. Calm washed over her as she recognized the familiar sensation. The women leaned over her, petting her hair and dabbing at her forehead with dirty engine rags.
“Welcome back, Curandera Negra,” Curandera Morena said to her.
“Where did I go?” Riff sat up on the Anti-Grav RelaxTop table.
The women eyed one another, as they covered her with a reflective heat blanket. Curandera Peliroja patted her thigh through the crinkling fabric and said, “You were birthed and gave birth. You are MOTHER and we are MOTHER. You are a Curandera now.”
“Who is The Wizard?” Riff sat up and pushed down the nausea that overwhelmed her.
Curandera Morena pulled the other Curanderas close and whispered to them as Riff looked on.
“We think he is on Enceladus.”
“But who is he?”
“We are not sure. MOTHER tells us only impressions, and we have to have a ceremony to contact her. Like the one you just participated in, hermana. We just know that is where we must go.”
“My brother is there.”
“We know. It was arranged that he go there.”
“By who?”
“Another sister.”
“Tengo sed,” Riff said and leaned back. The dead language came back at strange times.
“Por supuesto.” Curandera Morena brought her a recycled water bag and pierced the corner with her long fingernail. She handed it to Riff and drifted over to the control panel while Riff sipped from the dripping corner of the bag. She dragged her fingernails over the screen, peering into the light.
“We will meet The Wizard soon enough, it seems.”
The others looked over at her.
“We are just a few days away, hermanas.”
They abandoned Riff on the table and rushed over to the screen. Curandera Morena motioned to Riff to come and see. She slid from the table, the gravity drives pulling at her. Saturn loomed yellow and heavy on the edge of the screen and a thumb-sized sphere hung in the center. The Curanderas held one another, balling the fabric of one another’s robes in their gnarled hands.
“And so we approach the second home,” Curandera Morena said, her eyes glistening in the glow of the screen.
***
Rasp used a device that Papa had rigged to break and gather ice from outside the compound. It had a half-functioning laser that softened the ice enough to break it with the hard metal blade at the end of a long piece of titanium pipe torn from the Earthcraft that brought the men here. Papa foisted one of the hundreds of plasticine buckets at him.
“The ice is softer by the augers, by the drilling rigs,” he said, “you will want this.” Papa handed him a pistol. Rasp gasped.
“Wow. I thought they only had these for the Real Kill Pornographic Art Films. They are so old, but they deliver the high-quality android split-splat that Panorama Pictures promises,” Rasp recited from the streams.
“I don’t know what that means, but take it. You might need it.”
“How do I use it?”
Papa pressed a catch on the side and let the magazine drop into his palm.
“Look. It’s very easy.”
He pointed the gun at the far side of the room.
“Never point it unless you want to kill.”
“Will it work on those things in the hall?”
“Yes, but we only have about fifty bullets left.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It’s less than you think.”
“I didn’t know bullets ran out.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Papa sighed and handed him the gun. He loaded three cartridges into the magazine and showed Rasp how to cock and fire it.
“It is very limited, ok? It mostly just scares things here. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Rasp felt small. Ignorant. His excitement fading.
He tucked the pistol in his too-big cold suit and picked up the plasticine bucket. The wind pushed him back as he opened the hatch. The transparent front of his helmet fogged and crystallized as soon as his boot crunched on the ice. He pressed the warming function. The crystals on the right side melted into a transparent streak, leaving his helmet half obscured. He trudged out toward the frozen lake, the pistol rubbing against his hip bone.
As he neared the lake, he saw the drill site in the distance, the dark spire jutting from the machinery. A familiar shape glided toward him from the center of the lake. He felt MOTHER in his head.
“HURTS.”
“I know it hurts, but I have to get water now or I’ll be the one who hurts.”
“HELP.”
Rasp clenched his teeth and pulsed his jaw. Irritation rose in his throat.
“I don’t have the tools right now.”
“UP.”
Rasp rolled his eyes and activated the heat clear for his helmet.
“What’s up?” He laughed. “Are you telling a joke, MOTHER?”
“LOOK UP.” An image of an asteroid colliding into a small moon bloomed in his head.
He looked up. A craft arced over the horizon line, entering orbit. Its chemical signature pale blue. From what he could tell from his time astro-mining, it looked about 48 Earth hours before it landed. He looked at the monitor on his wrist. It blinked into the orange spectrum. A frowny face caked in ice blinked on the screen.
“I have to get back or I’ll get an early retirement,” he said into his helmet comms.
The craft disappeared below the horizon line as he looked up again.
“Are they friendly?” He asked MOTHER.
“FRIENDS.”
“Ok good. Why are they here?”
“FIND FRIENDS.”
“How much are you paying me to find them?” He chuckled at his own joke, covering his apprehension.
“FRIENDS FIND.”
“Oh, I see. They are trying to find us.”
“YES. LOOK.”
The landscape melted in front of him. Rasp was suddenly warm and full, wrapping an old woman’s naked body in strips of black packing plasticine. His body was not his body. He looked down at the hands of this body, small and smooth with gel laser-colored nails. He reached for a piece of plasticine and realized the length of his arms prevented him from reaching it without standing on his tiptoes. He perched on his tiptoes when an old woman standing across from him grabbed his newly feminine arm. He recoiled in disgust. He had forgotten how old people looked and smelled. Her palms were cold and calloused.
The old woman looked at him through suspicious eyes.
“Curandera Negra, ¿estás bien?”
“Sí, estoy bien. Gracias.” The words flowed out of him automatically.
“No eres Riff,” she said, her eyes narrowed. “¿Quién eres?”
“Rasp,” he said without hesitation.
“Do you know the great MOTHER?” She asked, switching to English.
“She brought me here.” His voice came out high and smooth.
The woman lurched toward him and took him by the shoulders. Her filmy eyes soft and worshipful.
“You must let me in. I must speak with her. It is my holy rite.”
“MOTHER?”
A thread of warm acceptance drew through his consciousness. The silver filament tattoos under her eyes glittered and flashed as she shaped her words. She drew out her vowels and laid her hand on the back of his neck.
“Yes. Yes. MOTHER. Let me call the others.”
The words flowed from him without thought or measure. He could not look away from her tattoos. Her voice coaxed him, aroused him, hurt him all at once.
“I don’t know how to let you talk to her. How far are you from landing?”
“About three days.”
“I’ll put up a beacon for you. Papa doesn’t trust MOTHER.” This was the correct answer. Bending to her was natural.
“Papa? There are no life readings except for you and MOTHER.”
“He’s underground. In the old military base, across the lake from the drilling facility.”
Another old woman rushed into the room and touched his arm, her silvery hair flying behind her. She wore a plasticine circlet with etchings of monstrous eyes impressed into it. She looked into his eyes.
“It’s not Riff?” She turned to face the other woman.
“Check the skin response and use your thrum voice.”
Rasp smiled at her, still wooed by the first voice, and felt his lips pull against his skin. His lips felt unnaturally full and thick.
“Send him back. This is not the way.”
“But we have a channel, sister. We can talk to HER.”
The dark-eyed woman wearing the circlet whirled on her, her face inches from the snubbed nose. Rasp stood very still, feeling the unfamiliar heartbeat in his chest. The air was charged.
“Send him back,” she hissed, her solid dark eyes shimmering. “It puts everything in danger.” She put her thumb on his forehead and pressed her fingertips into his cheeks while she fumbled with something in the folds of her robe. The other woman stepped forward to push her hands away from his face, knocking Rasp off balance.
“It’s my holy rite,” she said, pressing close to Rasp. “I want to talk to her.”
The dark-eyed woman pulled a bundle of silver wires from her pockets and dropped it to the floor. The hiss of steam filled the confined space, and Rasp felt himself falling into bright cold whiteness.
He found himself standing at the edge of the lake with the plasticine bucket still empty at his side. The auger across the lake lifted and dropped back down into the ice. The ground vibrated around him. The ice split in the center of the lake and sent frozen chips in all directions. They spattered on the frozen ground around him. His spiked boots clung as he bent to pick them up and put them in the bucket. The work came automatically. He couldn’t stop thinking about the brujas entering Enceladus’ orbit.
MOTHER surged under the broken ice, crushing the broken planes under the weight of her great arms. Her anger flooded his psyche with each lash. He fought her in his head, bending to pick up the bits of ice that flew from her claw-tipped tentacles.
A memory came back of Mama snatching away a statue of an angel that he was trying to clean for her and tossing it into the trash. His thumbprint on the angel’s clavicle. Mama’s eyes hard. Mama’s jaw tight. The sting of her slap. The anger pouring from her. He tried to explain himself, to tell her that he just wanted to make her happy. Another slap, her fingers tightening around his throat just for a moment until she stalked away. It was best to say nothing. To let her run out of steam.
MOTHER shouted into his head in an unknowable tongue. There was no sound to it, just pure and unbridled wrath. He felt the burn of stomach acid in his throat. His monitor beeped at him. The suit wouldn’t hold heat much longer. He picked up the bucket of ice and walked back to the compound. He didn’t want to help MOTHER. He didn’t want to help anymore.
He stumbled into the vestibule of the compound with two minutes remaining on the suit timer. Papa poked his head out from the laboratory door.
“Close the door!” he shouted above the wind and drew his coveralls collar over his nose.
Rasp rammed his thumb into the recessed door button and dropped the bucket. Steam rose from the pieces of ice as they settled.
As soon as the door slid closed, Papa staggered into the hallway. A strip of dirty, blood-spotted fabric was wound around his head. His matted curls stuck through the cloth that covered his right eye. A sprayer connected to a plasticine tube swung from his hands as he approached Rasp.
Rasp stepped out his suit and looked at his fingertips, examining them for signs of frostbite. The belt rigs had a safety video with a topless cartoon named Prevention Patty who sang a song and jumped up and down to help them remember to keep their equipment dry and look for clear blisters on their fingers and toes.
Papa sprayed him without warning. An oily liquid shot from the end of the tube and beaded over his face and chest. It burned his eyes and nose. He choked and rubbed his eyes. It was kerosene. He could smell it. Papa picked up the bucket of melting ice and sloshed it in Rasp’s face. He choked and gagged, and lashed out at Papa, who stepped aside from his blind strike.
“Why would you do that?” Rasp choked.
“Had to kill the outside things. Like bugs and bacteria.” His uncovered eye was unmoored and drifted before correcting itself.
Rasp rubbed the liquid from his eyes and reached for his coveralls that lay draped over a stack of open plastic crates by the suit hutch. The kerosene burned his skin. The dark shapes flitted around the corners down the hall. Papa had already grabbed the bucket of water and was waddling back to the quarters. Rasp called out to him.
“Wait. There’s a ship coming!”
Papa stopped in the hallway, the bucket dragging down his left side.
“A ship?”
“Yes, with brujas.”
“With what now?”
“Witches. I saw them.”
“They are here? On the planet?” Papa’s voice rose an octave. It sounded strange, unfamiliar.
“No. I…” Rasp stopped for a moment. Papa turned to face him. He was grinning. “I saw them from the monitoring system of my old ship. I went back there for some things I forgot,” Rasp lied.
“Well, we are going to need that ship, aren’t we?” A wild light seemed to pulse behind his uncovered eye.
“What about the women?” Rasp asked, wondering about how Papa injured his eye while he was gone.
“I haven’t seen a woman in years,” Papa said absently. “Turn on that drying chamber for your suit. We’ll need to prepare.”
“How did you hurt your eye?”
“It was always like this.”
Papa picked a bucket up and whistled a rhythmless tune as he strode into the dark hallway, water slopping over the side. The black shapes slipped from the corners and hovered over the water like the ghosts of some extinct insects.
***
Dearest Ana,
I write to you and not the children, our children, because I believe this to be my final transmission. Not because we will be out of range. Don’t let anyone tell you that, mi amor. The infrastructure is in place on Mars to hear and log all of our transmissions. You may never see this transmission or the others, but it is better to try and fail, than to die without telling you how wrong I was.
In The Black, I can only see myself. It is a mirror facing a mirror. A recantation of the history of me. Of my mistakes. Of past joys. A ritual of flagellation is the only ritual to combat the endless repetition.
This pale moon does not want us here. I think it reads our past lives.
I need to retreat here, if you are to believe me. Your skepticism grew with each of my sins and each of yours. A self-protective measure to be certain.
What I meant to say is that there is something here that knows us. I know the moon itself is just the remnants of collision and time. It’s just iron and carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen. I know this. It is just a thing. A thing without a heartbeat, without hands to touch, without a brain to reason. I know this. I swear to you, I do. But it hears us, Ana. Just as I have eyes to see that it is just ice and methane, I can tell you that it hears us. It manifests things, like a child trying to have a conversation. Such strange leaps it makes.
I had a dream where I was walking down a beach road, but the ocean spread on either side of the road into that deep gray infinity that you can only see when a storm is coming. Do you remember living in The Republic of Texas when I was deployed there? Those gray-black storm clouds tumbling in from the flats, cutting through the blue and stirring that still hot air? You would stand on the front porch with your black hair being lifted around you and smile just so, watching the birds caught in the downdrafts. Lightning etching itself, bright and silent before the heavy crush of thunder. Those clouds hung on either side of the road in my dream, just suspended above the ocean. The road dead-ended ahead of me and a small wooden building stood at the end, but it was made only of stairs. There were no entrances, just stairs leading to the flat sides of wooden walls. The ocean rose on either side of my small strip of road into great transparent walls on either side of me. Shadows of sea animals slipped past in the water as I walked toward the building. I could smell the salt as the water washed over the narrow road, covering my feet.
This was the end of things. The wall cannot stand.
When we were first married, you would lay your legs over me in the morning while I told you about my dreams. When I asked what you dreamed you would press your cold hands against my side and say you didn’t remember. Dreams were excesses to you, I believe.
I digress. I always digress.
I dreamed this dream every cycle until we landed the craft on the surface. My understanding of this place became manifest after my first trudge into The White.
It is important for you to know that The Corporation sent us an updated instructional manual after the privatization of our department within the Space Force. It was optimistic that we could return after the tagging and extraction operations were functional. That if we simply followed the instructions and performed the tasks asked of us, The Corporation would spare no expense to retrieve us. To reward us for our work. We would be heroes, they said.
And so, I left the safety of the pod to cross the lake. I was the physicality of the crew. The microbots that survived the trip were only just able to finish the laboratory before their battery packs died, and so it fell to me after Mignon died. I know that is a sore subject for you. Perhaps you will even get a thrill hearing that she died from a blood clot in her leg that traveled to her brain before we even reached The Whip. We were only three cycles past the last gate. We shot her body into The Black and watched it spin away like a toy buoyed away by a slow stream. I hope you will believe me when I say that she never held the same purchase on me that you did. Strange how something that small matters even as I write this as my last act.
This moon cannot be civilized.
The lake stretched before me, enormous and solid. It was my duty that day to mark the site for the drill with the LazBeacon so that The Corporation could send an Android Labor Vessel to trade places with us. I dragged it behind me in a sledge. As I neared the middle of the lake, I realized the great walls of ice on either side of me swirled with shadows of the sea animals from my dream, but they were not the exact form. It is difficult to explain. It was like singing a song that you have only heard once. Whales without heads. Fish with six tails.
I checked my oxygen and CO2 levels from my monitor, and they were all within normal range for the circumstances. When you’re in The Black, the mind creates fog creatures from your flawed brainspace in the absence of corporeality.
You will ask yourself, because you are you and I am me, was his mind intact? I assure you, my mind is intact. My undoing was the humanness that coursed through me. It is meaningless and yet it ties us to our progenitors. To gravity. To sunshine. To oxygen. There is water here, but you cannot drink it. Golden coins spew from our mouths, but we cannot eat. We cannot breathe.
My skin is falling from my bones and everything I missed is projected onto the walls. I saw our children taken from us, put to work in service of this machine that we created and recreated over and over again. I do not understand it. I saw our son toil on the naked back of space. Micrometeoroids tearing past the unseeing eye. His suit tinfoil against gunfire. Our daughter stripped to nothing but the barest purpose. The blackness of her eye altered by the market of perception.
I am lecturing. You used to tell me when I was lecturing, and I was hurt. I clung to my words as my right. I was entitled to them.
But now, all of the words I held so fast to will slip into the nothingness of space. The universe doesn’t stop expanding for us. We have met MOTHER. We have injured MOTHER.
I can feel my body coming apart. I want my last act to be one of contrition. I am sorry. I will say it again and again in hopes that by the time our universe is a lonesome vacuum, and we have long been wiped from the memory of the things we touched, that meaning will have circled back, and all that will be left is another loop and another and another.
If I told you that I loved you and that I loved our children, you would reply that it is not enough, and you would be correct. You always were. I love the idea of you. And so I finish this letter to a dead woman.
Amor,
Jaime