Teaser
A very provisional, first draft of chapter one of The Martian Princess (working title!), Part 5 of Isle of Dogs, or put another way, Volume 3 of DRIFT. Part One of Isle of Dogs (parts 1-4 of IOD comprise Volume 2 of DRIFT) will be published soon by the amazing, indefatigable, never tarnished, ever satanic seducer of the mind, Miette of Whiskey Tit, your literary wet nurse. There is a holler in nowhere vermont that holds the shattered limbs and besotted livers of her pride of surreal snarling and purring authors, of which I am lucky to be one. It’s a long hike up to the outhouse on the mountain.
ISLE OF DOGS PART 1: THE MARTIAN PRINCESS
I miss my world, Phaedra thought in her white sleep sac, the hair floating in a mass off her head like seaweed. Periodically she tried to reach up to touch it but she couldn’t feel her arms or legs, just the elastic bands of the sac. She was one in a row of tethered sleepers in sacs whose hair was fanned above their heads. The image was mesmerizing, bodies rolled up, suspended off the floor as if they were dangling from wires, not anchored to the ground, rising into a pool of indistinct, amber light.
Phaedra lay in a dormitory with ten other women and their children. They had arrived sealed in launch pods, called caskets, on a shuttle, enclosed in deep narco. When the shuttle had finished docking with The Constellations End, a prison ship bound for the Moon and then Mars, they were revived. The lids of their caskets popped open and she awoke, eyes snapping to, alert, but not certain where she was until she drifted free of her berth and for the first time felt the pull of the tether. Medusa hair framed their pale, lifeless faces. Where was the boy? She took his hand out of the dim air and watched how others reached for handles and pulled themselves along the soft empty walls. She followed.
The first days she lay in a fever. The hot radiating pain in her gut made her delirious and oblivious to her surroundings, reaching out for the boy tethered next to her for reassurance that she was awake and alive and not adrift in an oceanic dream or alien Bardo. It was awful, she could feel the life dying in her womb but she could not speak for the intense nausea. She did not eat. Her moans came to her from afar, and she was aware that the other women were angry that she disturbed their rest.
Someone must have called for a medic because before reaching the moon she was transported to the Surgery, where the ship’s surgeon, Admiral Sybil Cane, a seven-foot tall Ruler sidebar with a brass-colored crewcut, and indigo eyes striated with shimmering bars of azure and violet, hovered above her like a sky diver, staring down at her face with violent contempt while an orderly, hanging in the air, tightened the straps holding Phaedra to the white-sheeted gurney and a nurse launched a pair of gloves in the Admiral’s direction. She gripped the rail and raised her eyebrows, pulling in to view Phaedra closely, her eyes swimming around like neon reef fish and legs kicking slowly behind her.
“What are you, number 57607?” There was no humanity in the mask. “Your chart says you’re a Deadbeat with a Deadbeat in your gut.” She whispered 57607 and looked at the readout with curiosity. She touched her lips. “Hmmm. A very rich Deadbeat it looks like. Nurse, wand.” The nurse handed her a nano-tethered wand. She ran it over Phaedra’s bared belly. “What a wreck. Looks like a botched abortion.”
“Miscarriage.”
The surgeon almost smiled. “You’re too valuable to let die, I’m afraid. I’ll have to save your ass, my dear, 57607.” Her fingers were long and beautiful. She felt Phaedra’s floating strands of hair. “So soft. And glowing like a Ruler. Like a Ruler.” She laughed and smelled Phaedra’s hair as if it were a flower. “Unwashed. Intoxicating! Alas, it’s not safe to have hair in space. Nurse. Scissors.” The nurse took the wand and handed the surgeon a hair shears. Phaedra winced. The surgeon snorted. “Do I look like I miss my hair? I’m doing you a favor.”
Phaedra felt herself about to cry. She fought the tears but for some reason her hair now contained everything that was left of her. It was as if she could feel the blade cold against her scalp, hair dropping in hunks. Tears welled out of her eyes but instead of falling they lifted off her eyelid and formed tiny silver spheres that bobbed away. She was so astonished she stopped crying and watched them disappear. She could barely follow what the surgeon was saying. She wanted to vanish. The more the Admiral talked the more frightened she became. Rulers were predators but she could feel that Sybil Cane was an emotional vampire, that she sucked fear and youth for her own sustenance. Suddenly she appeared to her to be much older than she thought at first. 57607. That was her name now. Fragments of the brief orientation they had received upon arrival on The Constellations End came back to her, a blue robot cube on wheels, eyeless and roving, antennae nervously sensing the air, delivering a speech in eloquent tones. You have no name in space. Space. What the fuck was space? Her only categories were mythological.
“I love the feel, I must say, of long locks of glowing yellow hair, especially sweet young hair before it dies.” Admiral Sybil Cane half-closed her eyes and kissed Phaedra’s lower lip. Her repellent mouth was dry and cold, the skin chapped, and on her upper lip two blisters had erupted with perfect beads of fluid like dew. There was a faint odor of whiskey. Phaedra’s core collapsed like a raisin. She wanted to pass out. Instead she dwelt in her radiating hate, the sharp pain when she shifted and the constant stomach-pitching nausea. “A little tongue 57607?” The Admiral withdrew and chuckled, snapping the scissors open and shut. “Regulations, 57607. Look but do not touch. Or, just a little touching. Nothing dramatic, I think you’ll agree?” She handed the scissors back to the nurse and said, “You may keep your dangerous hair. They’ll shave it soon anyway.” Sprawled above her, she pressed her abdomen and Phaedra cried out. The surgeon placed a clammy hand on her forehead. “We’re gonna save that little Deadbeat, and you too, my dear.” She turned to the nurse. “Suction.” The nurse drifted by with a suction wand attached to a corrugated hose. The Admiral rubbed her nose back and forth, stretched her fingers into the suspended pair of gloves and took the suction wand. Watching a screen she placed the device in the opening of Phaedra’s vagina and it threaded her cervix and entered the uterus, which the surgeon carefully vacuumed out with a gentle and expert touch. The nurse handed her a long needled syringe and she injected a ghastly blue blob of protective RenewGel into Phaedra’s womb. “Back to the sac, 57607.” Sybil Cane watched Phaedra pull herself along the walls and out the door, hair like a Van Gogh sunflower. “Damn,” she said to the nurse. “That one’s hot.”
Back in her office Sybil spoke to her assistant Yrmela, a prisoner sentenced to life in space for the crime of poisoning her Ruler employer Euric Arles, the junior Senator from Missourri. The court had shown mercy when Yrmela demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the Ruler had tortured her for sexual pleasure, ordering her to be brutally mutilated while he and his boyfriend, a waiter from St. Louis named Jack Frost, fucked. She bore the scars on her face, breasts and hands. The scars were disfiguring and still raw. The court refused therapy but when she came to the Constellation the Admiral, upon an initial examination, felt a tug of attraction. Something in the stitched face and human sadness aroused her and she found herself feeding on the pain that coursed through the young woman’s body and aged her. No one would have guessed that Yrmela was twenty three. She looked like a tired out forty-year-old. Upon inquiry she discovered that Yrmela had been tutor to the Ruler Euric Arles’ Scion, and before that kept the household accounts. She was in fact a highly articulate, well-read, scientifically literate human being and she needed such a person to keep her records. Her presence in the office was gratifying enough and she resisted the call to sex. Sex was what landed the Admiral in space, and she could not afford another demerit for fraternization. Fucking prisoners was simply not tolerated, it ruined their value. It was a form of stealing. Sex and lust unleashed dangerous forces in space. Rulers and other employees of Kuiper Belt Space Industries were expected to use prostitutes, thoughtfully provided by the company in numerous places, space stations, artificial moons, and large space craft such as The Constellations End were equipped with prostitution services. But who wants to screw a fly that has serviced thousands? On the street on Earth or Mars it was easy not to think about that. In space the fact was fundamental. And few space prostitutes even pretended to care. They performed their services with bloodless efficiency and the line between masturbation and getting schwanked by a space whore was minimal. But she tired of her fingers and longed for the chase and sometimes, as with Yrmela, the right one came along and in the privacy of her quarters she could negotiate sex or at least a flirtation. The fact that Sybil Cane viewed others as food did not mean that she didn’t sometimes love her beasts. Like naming an animal you are going to eat, it complicated things, and in the end she knew she would have to put Yrmela to death. But not yet. She saw through Yrmela of course. The girl was grateful but carried the freight of her torture and humiliation. Cane worked that very finely and the key to the relationship was the most basic possible, a skeleton key. She would heal her of her scars in return for service. Early on that was sexual but Yrmela’s pain and sadness were unbearable. Straight up pain, hatred, fear, they were fine but there was nothing less arousing than sadness and tears.
“Yrmela,” the Admiral said, “search the records for 57607.”
“Aye aye, Sire,” Yrmela said, her inch long light brown hair standing straight off her head. She sipped from a floating squeeze tube of orange juice and raced through the records. “There isn’t much. She was arrested in New York in December and transported from the COOP City Station in NY.”
“What’s her genome?”
“Standard Deadbeat. Licensed material present but not analyzed. I could try to mine the records for more detail.”
“No. The records aren’t worth shit.” The Admiral rolled her eyes. “With that idiot Everest in charge they sweep everything up and blast it out into space like so much garbage. Good for us I suppose but it gets me no closer to Earth. Run her genome and report back.”
57607 was different than any other pregnant girl she’d had. Sybil felt the rush of erotic obsession, a yearning that burned in her veins and settled in her gut.
