The Stars Are Legion(3)

“I’m afraid,” I say, and that is partly the truth. I am afraid of what I am going to have to do to this person who claims she is my sister, but who I want to take into my arms and fuck until the world ends.





“MEMORY IS A MEATY AND DELIRIOUS THING, AND IT MAKES US PRONE TO FALSE RECOLLECTIONS. STORIES MAKE MEMORY; IT’S MERELY A MATTER OF REPEATING THE STORY MOST BENEFICIAL TO ONE’S PURPOSE.”

—LORD MOKSHI, ANNALS OF THE LEGION





2


ZAN


I sleep in a room three paces across and eight paces long. I curl up in a filmy blanket that’s slightly spongy, like porous bread. Sleeping periods are marked by the change in light across the whole of the ship, from milky green to soft blue. I’m surprised that my body responds so quickly to the change in the light, lulling me to sleep almost instantly each period. Perhaps my body remembers many things my mind does not.

“The memory will come,” Jayd reassures me each sleeping period as she tucks me in after the long, sweaty exercise sessions in the tubular room at the end of the corridor outside my room. The corridor reminds me of the throat of some monster. When I ask about the rippling line of the ceiling, Jayd tells me that one of the big arteries of the ship runs overhead.

“An artery?” I say. “Does it move . . . blood?”

“Of a sort,” she says. “The lifeblood of the ship. It’s different from ours, but serves the same function. It brings up all the recycled proteins from the center of the world and feeds each level.”

The idea of living inside the belly of an organism unsettles me. “Is it safe?” I say. “Why doesn’t the ship eat us?”

She looks away. “It devours us all in the end.”

During the waking periods, I work with several others in hand-to-hand combat and grappling. When I try to speak to them, Jayd tells me they do not have tongues. I think perhaps it is a figure of speech, but when they open their mouths to bark or leer, I see they have no tongues. They communicate in a sign language that seems familiar to me. After a few of these sessions, I remember what some of the signs are: smarter, good effort, and skull-eater. I sign skull-eater back at one of them and she looks as if I’d said I was going to gut her.

“What’s skull-eater?” I ask Jayd as we walk back to my room.

Her back stiffens. “Where did you hear that?”

“Just something that came to me,” I say. I don’t want her to know how much of the sign language I can understand. Not yet. “I don’t know,” Jayd says, and it’s a relief to know with certainty that she is lying. I still don’t know how much of what she has told me is a lie or an exaggeration. I yearn to trust her, but my body urges caution. Once again, my body intuits what my mind has forgotten.

“Why can’t you just tell me what’s happened,” I ask her, “the way you’ve told me the other things?”

“Because you will go mad,” Jayd says. She opens the door to my room. My bruises are fading.

“How do you know?”

Jayd hesitates on the threshold. She speaks softly, as if to herself, without turning. “Because if we tell you too soon, you go mad,” she says, “and then you could be recycled, or thrown out there at the Mokshi without the reconditioning you’re doing now. You don’t want to start over like that. You will have no chance, and then you will be stuck out there for turns and turns again. Or maybe the Mokshi will kill you this time. And I . . . I don’t want that.”

“I want my memory back, Jayd. I want what was stolen.”

“You will get it,” she says, “when Mother has the Mokshi.”

I have no sense of time here, and though Jayd calls it a ship, or perhaps a world, for all I know, we could be deep underground at the center of some star. I spend endless nights trying to figure out how to open the door that seals behind Jayd whenever she leaves. I run my hands over the seams of the great wedged panels that purl open when Jayd enters. But though running my hands over it brings back memories of me doing this same thing again and again, it tells me nothing else.

As my bruises disappear, I resolve that this is not how I’m going to end my life, trapped in whatever cyclical horror these mad people have engineered for me.

This is what I’m thinking about when I pop one of the women in the training ring in the face with my fist. I don’t pull the punch this time as I have with all the others, and she reels back, pinwheeling her arms.

I leap at her. Her companions swarm me. I duck and dodge. My fists come up. I make four solid hits. Blood spatters my face. I’m not training now, I’m fighting, and Jayd’s fearful voice is just a dull buzzing at the edges of my awareness.

When Jayd takes my shoulder, I turn, fists up. She does not recoil. But the heat bleeds out of me. I let out a breath.

Around me, the three women I’ve been training with are all on the floor. There’s blood. Not a lot, but enough to startle me.

“Go back to your room,” Jayd says.

I stare down at the women. One has a burst nose. Another is spitting blood. Another crawls away from me, hand pressed to her ribs.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what—”

“Go,” Jayd says. “I’ll take care of them.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again, and turn on my heel and scuttle out of the room. I step into the corridor and take deep breaths. Stare at my fists. What am I, really? What have they made me into?