She Walks in Shadows(76)
Habit makes me flick on a monitoring channel for the womb-beat to accompany me into chemical haze. A quarter of the chambers down there are occupied by embryos in various states of gestation, tadpoles with frenzied hearts. The lottery is meant to treat all applicants equally, but in reality, it’s of course more than luck. Fitness to parent. Relative wealth. Politics. Even the range of available genetic material differs; not all options are accessible to applicants with lesser claims.
I don’t see the chambers in person often and have watched the decantation process just twice. The most alien moment of our existence: newly born infants are so animal when they first howl, so strangely inhuman when they are calm. It’s better after they are cleaned — watching them emerge from amniotic fluids has always unsettled me — but even then, the nursery is full of small, inscrutable creatures with amorphous minds undefined by thought or geometry. Once, our forebears integrated behavioral modules into the uteral chamber to prime for socialization and language, but that piece of civilization has been sacrificed for survival. Like so much else. Soon, even the hothouse will go: It’s long been thought of as more decorative than efficient, that one spot of color in all the station, and food will turn to nutritional efficiency rather than things with crunch and flavor.
There must be more than the endless din, the susurrus of salt, the shadow of Prathayayi that spares nothing. But if that exists, a possibility of a condition beyond the decay we know, it, too, has been lost.
When I flex my hand, webbing tautens wet and green between my fingers. A byproduct of the cigarette and a recurrent fantasy — half-subconscious, half-intent. Sometimes, I dream of the tank breaking, the corridors filling, and all of us turning to scales and fins. The babies spreading their limbs in starfish metamorphosis, infant fat shedding and gums hardening in their mouths, tiny fingers and thumbs replaced by eyes. An easy existence severed from endocrine burden, an echinoderm bliss without future or past.
The comedown is rarely predictable. As often excruciating as exquisite, this time barely a ripple, so much so that when the alarm trespasses on my vision, I mistake it for a drugged residue. There are still fins on my throat and my table is still half-submerged, sodden with seaweed. I know it’s not real because the hallucination goes only so far; I smell nothing but office damp and nicotine cocktail. The alarm seems distant.
That pleasant languor eventually breaks, timed toward the end of my shift. Monitoring channels lets me know that nothing amiss happened — that trespassing notification was a glitch, after all. To be conscientious, I run an inventory check. Supplies fine, womb-chambers calibrated, no sensor tripped.
Habit again, on the way out, to look on Prathayayi. Always the same, larger than life. In the crèche, we can only see one part of her at a time: a lineless finger pressed against a window, a black cheek under a floor tile, wrist curving along a corridor. The side of a breast pressed against the shell of the maintenance hub, luminescent.
The fable of sightless hermits groping to tell the shape of an elephant and so we are.
When the first death happens, I don’t hear of it until the autopsy.
People die all the time on the station, some easier and quicker than others. We all live badly, in poverty of flesh and spirit, but in the segment furthest from the crèche and Prathayayi’s pulse, they live poorer than most. An officer asking me in comes as a surprise.
The Inspector has no use for preamble. “The deceased recently applied for a crèche license.”
I glance at the profile she sent me, displayed in the corner of my vision. “He requested entry into the lottery, then withdrew before the results.”
“I’d like to show you what his body is like. It’s rather shocking, but your opinion would be of value.”
“I’ve seen shocking,” I say, without thinking but not untrue. Being alive is shocking.
When I last saw the deceased, he was losing his hair, middle-aged and skin cut close to the bone. He’d gained some flesh since. While I’d hardly call his state sanguineous, there’s a radiance to his face that one associates with good health. Clear, supple skin, lustrous hair, features lax in repose.
The rest of him inspires a less-hopeful prognosis. He lies on the slab in a state of disassembly, severed limbs cleaned and laid out like spare parts. More parts than can be accounted for one body and some of them the wrong size. A small, stumpy leg. A tiny foot the size of a cowrie shell, as though his vivisection had been mixed up with that of a doll. “What are those?”
“They were inside him. A fetus in third-trimester development. Or rather,” the Inspector corrects herself, “parts of a fetus. As though he was pregnant, but, since he lacked a uterus, the fetus was ... distributed.”
“That’s a very silly idea, Inspector.”
“So it is. You work at the crèche,” she says, as though the crèche is a secret temple where impossible sorcery and unlikely biology occur. “You’d have a better idea of what might have happened than I do.”
I try to make out whether she’s being sarcastic or engaging in some strange interrogation technique. “I really don’t, Inspector. The rare times we’ve approved manual birth, we first make sure the bearer is equipped for it. If I must stage a guess, an unlicensed surgeon and an implant-gone-wrong seem much likelier.” I sketch in the air, no shape in particular but a gesture that, to the layperson, seems erudite. “To keep his youth or what else, who knows? It was certainly not going to get him a baby.”