Periphery Read online

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know, Ruth. I remember my sixteenth birthday, and then it’s like a thick blank curtain with holes torn in it. A lot of screaming and crying and slamming doors. A hospital corridor, a horrible jacket that wrapped my arms together, another room where they never let me out…” She shook her head. “Just blurred scenes in a nightmare, until I was here.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “I suppose they got found out, I suppose they’re in prison.”

  “Do you remember what they thought was wrong with you? You said “termination-level.” Who told you that? What gave you that idea?”

  She wiped away the tears before they could fall. I saw her struggle, the way she’d struggled to speak the last time I was in here. This time she lost the fight. If she had ever known what was wrong, she didn’t know now—

  “I can’t remember. I think my parents never told me anything, but maybe I heard something in the hospital, or I saw something on the tv.” She pressed her fist to her mouth, the knuckles staring white. “I don’t know, but I’m scared.”

  The nail that sticks out will be hammered down. The USE saw certain “traits” as enemies of the state. By no means were all of the proscribed genes life-threatening.

  “You don’t have to be scared. They don’t send just any condemned criminals to the Panhandle, Hilde. We have to be aged between eighteen and forty, and normally fertile. If you’d had a termination-level genetic disease you’d have been sterilised as soon as they spotted you; and you wouldn’t be here.”

  This beautiful girl was a recessive carrier for some kind of cancer they were trying to stamp out, or some other condition that wouldn’t harm her until she was fifty and past child-bearing. She’d been condemned like rotten meat by bad science.

  I hoped I’d reassured her. Destroyed by longing, I was having trouble keeping my voice level. I was afraid I sounded cold and unsympathetic—

  “If we have to be fertile, what about Sista?”

  I shook my head. “She’s never had a re-assignment, she couldn’t afford it. It’s all cosmetic. She’s classified as a fertile male by the Panhandle system.”

  I wanted to hold her but I didn’t dare to touch her. I despised the crude thrumming in my blood, the shameful heat in my crotch. Thankfully Hilde was too intent on her confession to notice me; still convinced that she was some kind of pariah. Poor kid, hadn’t she grasped we were all pariahs together?

  “You d-don’t have anything about m-my criminal record on your tablet?”

  “Not a thing.”

  This was absolutely true. I had professional profiles, listed qualifications for ten prisoners who were far from ordinary, including myself. Hilde was one of the four non-violent common criminals, all young women, who seemed to have been added to the mix at random: nothing recorded except their names and ages.

  “Oh. All right. But, but there’s something…” She drew a breath, like someone about to dive into deep water, then jumped down and opened her locker.

  I’d better go—

  I couldn’t say that, it betrayed me. I tried to frame a safer exit line. Hilde climbed back into the tray where I’d imagined blood and viscera, in my own cabin, the first “night.” Her hands were full of slippery, shining red stuff.

  I thought I was hallucinating. Her locker should be empty. All our lockers were empty; we had no material baggage.

  “What—?”

  “I found this,” she said. “In my locker. There’s a green one and a blue one, as well.” She was holding up a nightdress, a jewel-bright nightdress, scarlet satin with lace at the bodice and hem. “I know it shouldn’t be there, you don’t have to tell me, I understand about the transit. Ruth, please help me. What’s going on?”

  We’d all had strange experiences, but nothing so incongruous, and nothing ever that two people shared. I touched the stuff; I could feel the fabric, slippery and cool. “I don’t know,” I said. “Strange things happen. Better not think about it.”

  “My parents used to buy me pretty night clothes. When I was a little girl I imagined I could go to parties in my dreams, like a princess in a fairytale.” She hugged the satin as if it were a favourite doll, her eyes fixed on mine. “If anyone had asked, when I was drugged, what I most wanted to take with me, I might have said, my nightdresses, like that little girl. But why can I touch this?”

  “It’s the torus. It’s messing with our minds.”

  It flashed on me that the veil was getting thin, orientation was nearly over. Hilde knelt there with her arms full of satin and lace. “I’ve never even kissed anyone,” she said. “Except my mom and dad. But I’ve had a life in my mind… I know what I want, I know you want it too. There’s no time left. Why won’t you touch me?”

  “I’m thirty-seven, Hilde. You’re nineteen. You could be my daughter.”

  “But I’m not.”

  So there was no safe exit line, none at all. I kissed her. She kissed me back. The texture of her hair had been a torment. The touch of her mouth, the pressure of her breasts, drenched me, drowned me. I’d had men as lovers, and they’d satisfied my itch for sex. I’d hardly ever dared to expose myself to another woman, even in outlaw circles where forbidden love was accepted. But nothing compares to the swell of a woman’s breast against my own, like to like—

  There were laws against homosexuality, and the so-called genetic trait was proscribed. But you could get away with being “metrosexual,” as long as it was just a lifestyle choice; as long as you were just fooling around. As long as you were rich, or served the rich, and made ritual submission by lying about it, the USE would ignore most vices. I held her, and I knew she’d guessed my secret, the unforgivable crime behind my catalogue of civil disobedience. I can only love women. Only this love means anything to me, like to like. No “games” of dominance and subordination that are not really games at all. No masters, no slaves, NO to all of that—

  My sister, my daughter, put your red dress on. Let me find your breasts, let me suckle through the slippery satin. Undress me, take me with your mouth and with your hands, forget the past, forget who we were, why we are here. We are virgin to each other, virgins together. We can make a new heaven and a new earth, here at the last moment, on this narrow bed—

  When I went back to my own cabin, I found a note on my room control message board. It was from Carpazian.

  Dear Captain Ruth,

  Something tells me our playtime is nearly over. When we dead awaken, if we awaken, may I respectfully request to be considered for the honour of fathering your first child. Georgiou.

  I laughed until I cried.

  v

  Hilde’s bunk became a paradise, a walled garden of delight. We danced there all the ways two women can dance together, and the jewel-coloured nightdresses figured prominently, absurdly important. I didn’t care where they had come from, and I didn’t understand what Hilde had been trying to tell me.

  Everyone knew, at once: the team must have been keeping watch on whose cabin I visited. I was as absurdly important as those scraps of satin. Mike and Gee came to see me. I thought they wanted to talk about pregnancy. It was a genuine issue, with all this rush of pairing-up. We didn’t know if we were still getting our prison-issue contraception, which was traditionally delivered in the drinking water. None of us women had had a period, but that didn’t mean much. They wanted to deliver a protest, or a warning. They said “people” felt I ought to be careful about Hilde.

  I told them my private life was my own affair.

  “There’s a hex on us,” said Mike, darkly. “Who’s causing it?”

  “You mean the strange phenomena? How could any of us be causing them? It’s the torus. Or the Panhandle system, keeping us off balance to keep us docile.”

  Gee made more sense. “She’s not clear of the drugs yet, Captain. I can tell. There’s got to be a good reason she was kept under like that.”

  The hairs ro
se on the back of my neck; I thought of lynch-mobs.

  “Yeah, sure. We’re all criminals, you two as well. But it’s over now.”

  After that deputation I sent a note to Carpazian, accepting his honourable proposal, should such a time ever come, and made sure I sent it on the public channel. Maybe that was a mistake, but I was feeling a little crazy. If battle lines were drawn, the team better know that Hilde and I had allies, we didn’t stand alone.

  We had a couple of very dark simulations after that, but we came out of them well. I felt that the system, my secret ally, was telling me that I could trust my girl.

  The unresponsive woman woke up, and proved to be an ultra-traditional Japanese (we’d only known that she looked Japanese). She could barely speak English; but she immediately convinced us to surround ourselves with tiny rituals. Whatever we did had to be done just so. Sitting down in a chair in the dayroom was a whole tea ceremony in itself. It was very reassuring.

  Angie said to me, strange isn’t wrong, Ruth.

  Miqal, the Iranian, came to my cabin. Most of them had visited me, on the quiet, at one time or another. She confessed that she was terrified of the transit itself. She had heard that when you lay down in the Buonarotti capsule you had terrible, terrible dreams. All your sins returned to you, and all the people you had betrayed. The thrum of those subliminal engines filled my head, everything disappeared. I was walking along the curving corridor again, my doppelganger at vanishing point; but the corridor was suspended in a starry void. The cold was horrific, my lungs were bursting, my body was coming apart. I could see nothing but Miqal’s eyes, mirrors of my terror—

  The hejabi woman clung to me, and I clung to her.

  “Did it happen to you?” we babbled. “Did it happen to you—?”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” I said, when we were brave enough to let go.

  Carpazian was right, the stay of execution was over, and any haunting would have been better than this. We lived from moment to moment, under a sword.

  H15750, N310, O6500, C2250, Ca63, P48, K15, S15, Na10, Cl6, Mg3, Fe1,

  Trace differences, tiny differences, customising that chemical formula into human lives, secrets and dreams. The Buonarotti process, taking that essence and converting it into some inexplicable algorithm, pure information…

  *

  “We’ll have what we’ve managed to carry,” I said. “And no reason why we shouldn’t eat the meat and vegetables, since our bodies will be native to Landfall.”

  “We could materialize thousands of miles apart,” said Hilde.

  “Kitty says it doesn’t work like that.”

  Kitty, the woman whose nickname had been “Flick,” had come out of a closet of her own. She was, as I had always known but kept it to myself, a highly qualified neurochemist. Take a wild guess at her criminal activities. I’d had to fight a reflex of disgust against her, because I have a horror of what hard drugs can do. She and Achmed knew more than the rest of us put together about the actual Buonarotti process. Achmed had refused to talk about it, after his first pronouncement, but Kitty had told us things, in scraps. She said teams like ours would “land” together, in the same physical area, because we’d become psychically linked.

  We were in Hilde’s cabin. She was lying on top of me in the narrow bunk, one of the few comfortable arrangements. It was the sixth “night,” or maybe the seventh. She stroked my nose, grinning.

  “Oh yes, Captain. Very good for morale, Captain. You don’t know.”

  “I don’t know anything, expect it’s cold outside and warm in here.”

  I tipped her off so we were face to face, and made love to her with my eyes closed, in a world of touch and taste. My head was full of coloured stars, the sword was hanging over me, fears I hadn’t known I possessed blossomed in the dark. What’s wrong with her, what kind of terminal genetic error? Why was she condemned, she still has amnesia, what is it that she doesn’t dare to remember? Oh they will turn you in my arms into a wolf or a snake. The words of the old song came to me, because I was afraid of her, and my eyes were closed so I didn’t know what I was holding—

  The texture of her skin changed. I was groping in rough, coarse hair, it was choking me. It changed again; it was scale, slithery and dry. I shot upright, shoving myself away from her. I hit the light. I stared.

  My God.

  “Am I dreaming?” I gasped. “Am I hallucinating?”

  A grotesque, furred and scaly creature shook its head. It shook its head, then slipped and slithered back into the form of a human girl in a red nightdress.

  “No,” said Hilde. “I became what you were thinking. I lost control—”

  Hilde; something else, something entirely fluid, like water running.

  “I told you I had a genetic disease. This is it.”

  “Oh my God,” I breathed. “And you can read my mind?”

  Her mouth took on a hard, tight smile. She was Hilde, but she was someone I’d never met: older, colder, still nineteen but far more bitter.

  “Easily,” she said. “Right now it’s no trick.”

  I fought to speak calmly. “What are you? A…a shape-changer? My God, I can hardly say it, a werewolf?”

  “I don’t know,” said older, colder Hilde, and I could still see that fluid weirdness in her. “My parents didn’t know either. But I’ve thought about it and I’ve read about the new science. I’ve guessed that it’s like Koffi said, do you remember? The Buonarotti Transit takes what Carpazian calls the soul apart: and it has unleashed monsters. Only they don’t “happen” near the torus—they get born on earth. The government’s trying to stamp them out, and that’s what I am. I didn’t mean to deceive you, Ruth. I woke up and I was here, knowing nothing and in love with you—”

  I wanted to grab my clothes and leave. I had a violent urge to flee.

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “I didn’t know! I found the nightdresses, I knew that was very strange, I tried to tell you, but even then I didn’t know. The memories only just came back.”

  “Why did they send you out here? Why didn’t they kill you?”

  “I expect they were afraid.” Hilde began to laugh, and cry. “They were afraid of what I’d do if they tried to kill me, so they just sent me away, a long, long way away. What does it matter? We are dead, Ruth. You are dead, I am dead, the rest is a fairytale. What does it matter if I’m something forbidden? Something that should never have breathed?”

  Forbidden, forbidden… I held out my arms, I was crying too.

  Embrace, close as you can. Everything’s falling apart, flesh and bone, the ceramic that yields like soft metal, the slippery touch of satin, all vanishing—

  As if they never were.

  vi

  Straight to orientation, then. There were no guards, only the Panhandle system’s bots, but we walked without protest along a drab greenish corridor to the Transit Chamber. We lay down, a hundred of us at least, in the capsules that looked like coffins, our grave goods no more than neural patterns, speed-burned into our bewildered brains. I was fully conscious. What happened to orientation? The sleeve closed over me, and I suddenly realised there was no reprieve, this was it. The end.

  *

  I woke and lay perfectly still. I didn’t want to try and move because I didn’t want to know that I was paralyzed, buried alive, conscious but dead. Oh I could be bounded in a walnut shell and count myself the king of infinite space. I had not asked for a dream, but a moment since I had been in Hilde’s arms. Maybe orientation hasn’t begun yet, I thought, cravenly. The surface I was lying on did not yield like the ceramic fiber of the capsule, there was cool air flowing over my face and light on my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the grass: something very like blades of bluish, pasture grass, about twenty centimeters high, stirred by a light breeze.

  The resurrected sat up, all around me: like little figures in a religious picture from Mediaeval Europe. The team was mainly together, but we were surrounded by a sea of bodies, mostly women,
some men. A whole shipload, newly arrived at Botany Bay. The romance of my dream of the crossing was still with me, every detail in my grasp; but already fading, as dreams do. I saw the captain’s armband on my sleeve. And Hilde was beside me. I remembered that Kitty had said teams like ours were linked. Teams like ours: identified by the system as the leaders in the consensus. I’d known what was going on, while I was in the dream, but I hadn’t believed it. I stared at the girl with the cinnamon braids, the shape-changer, the wild card, my lover.

  If I’m the captain of this motley crew, I thought, I wonder who you are…

  *

  GJ: The Voyage Out is the title of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, published in 1915. The opening sequence features a woman (actually a secondary character) in utter heartbreak, because she’s going with her husband on a trip-of-a-lifetime to South America, and she has to leave her children behind… It’s seen by many critics as a study of Woolf’s own costly transit from the private to the public world—and her voyage of rather toxic discovery—into married life.

  I’ve written about the Panhandle Station before. In the last story (“The Fulcrum”), the Buonarotti Device was still experimental, literally a lottery. Characters in “The Fulcrum” speculate that the Device will soon be used as a means of disposing of awkward activists and surplus population. In “The Voyage Out” this futuristic form of Transportation (to the Botany Bay of First Landfall) has become reality. But things happen to people who come to the Panhandle for transit, things that nobody understands… When Lynne asked me to contribute to this anthology, I’d been reading L. Timmel Duchamp’s Alanya To Alanya, and I think Ruth Norman is sideways related to Timmi’s Kay Zeldin, a high-powered elite-academic in a similarly lawless yet oppressive future USA. A woman who has starved herself of pleasure so that she can live a life of principle; who has beaten herself up repeatedly, to keep her career etc. intact, but who has all kinds of longings and untapped potential. The secret life of nightdresses is a very ancient fantasy of mine, dating from when I was a little girl. It has to do with a fairy tale about some princesses who used to sneak out of bed at night and go off dancing in fairyland. I used to spend a fair amount of time ill in bed, and was devoted to my nightclothes. Much nicer than the clothes I had to wear in the waking world, where it was school uniform and other depressing outfits. The original Hilde was a girl at school with me, who had frizzy cinnamon braids and a beautiful smile. I always liked the look of her. I never said anything. She was sporty, it was hopeless. I don’t think I need to explain the Gruffaloes.